


The Seam Between

by copper_dust



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1990s, Coming of Age, Gen, Growing Up, Illustrations, Melancholy, Multimedia, Music, Nightmares, Number Four Privet Drive (Harry Potter), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Puberty, Realistic, Teen Angst, Trauma, little whinging, recovering from trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:53:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 26,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26916166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/copper_dust/pseuds/copper_dust
Summary: July, '95. Harry's worst ever summer. Against a backdrop of Tory suburbia, royal divorce, Britpop, hip hop and war in the former Yugoslavia,  Harry is sticking it out through a summer plagued by the twin demons of trauma and puberty. He's going to be okay—just not this year.
Relationships: Arabella Figg & Harry Potter, Dudley Dursley & Harry Potter, Petunia Evans Dursley & Harry Potter, Vernon Dursley & Harry Potter
Comments: 38
Kudos: 63





	1. family

S I D E A

  1. family
  2. complaint
  3. violent
  4. mad
  5. lullaby



S I D E B

  1. fridge
  2. spotlight
  3. dreams
  4. swear
  5. life



C O D A

* * *

**_but you see, it's not me_ **

**_it's not my family_ **

**The Cranberries, "Zombie"**

"—that we have on Professor Pavel Markovic, associate professor of Slavic Studies at University of Cambridge, to discuss the latest news coming out of Sarajevo. Professor Markovic recently published an op-ed in the Times arguing that—"

Harry clapped a hand to his forehead when a ripple of pain flickered through his scar. The pains had come, on and off, over the past few days. He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the car window.

"—exactly, Margaret, and what we saw with the Vrbanja Bridge was just one example of the lengths to which the Serbs will go. The human rights abuses that have_"

Petunia sighed heavily, and changed the station. Tinny pop music poured into the car like sticky syrup.

"Where exactly is Sarajevo, again?" asked Harry idly, from the back seat.

"Don't they teach you anything in that school?!" scolded Petunia. "How they ever passed the OFSTED, I won't guess."

Harry was certain that Hogwarts was not inspected by OFSTED, but he thought it best not to bring that up. The car bumped over a speed hump, and Petunia flicked at her turn signal like it was a gnat. He slumped back against the neck rest and closed his eyes again. The smell of melting rubbish wafted in through the driver's seat's open window. The Dursleys' air conditioning was not working again (probably because of chewing gum lodged in the air vents by Dudley), and the car was hot like a convection oven. Harry imagined his buttocks roasting into little cinnamon buns, and almost laughed out loud, when his scar twinged again.

"The old Yugoslavia," said Petunia, at last. "Not that you would know anything about that." She glanced at the rearview mirror, and Harry noticed clumps of mascara dangling from her eyelashes.

"Not that much," he said, truthfully. He wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.

"Don't open that window," Petunia continued. "The crank's broken. It can't be closed."

"Okay."

Harry knew she had changed lanes when the turn signal stopped clicking. His eyelids were heavy. He and Ron had played cards until four in the morning and woken up three hours later for the train. The music drifted over him. _When the weather's fine, you've got women, you've got—_

"When you get home, put all your clothes in the laundry room at once," said Petunia.

 _—women on your mind_.

She checked for his assent in the rearview mirror, but Harry did not nod, for he was already back in the graveyard, the seatbelt a rope lashing him to a slab of dark granite.


	2. complaint

**_hey! wait!_ **

**_i've got a new complaint_ **

**Nirvana, "Heart-Shaped Box"**

Harry measured the next three days in terms of when he couldn't sleep (at night), when he did sleep (in short naps during the day) and when he _felt_ asleep and adrift from logic (all the time). When the floor no longer swayed under him, boat-like, and he could walk through a doorway without feeling like he was passing through a portal into an alternative universe, Harry noticed the pain in his cut arm getting worse. He peeled back the bandage and noticed yellow pus forming around the knife wound, and a halo of creamy white outlining the red slit.

In the upstairs bathroom, Harry opened the medicine cabinet. The _Flintstones_ vitamins were next to a paracetamol bottle that contained Dudley's weed stash. To touch this container was to ensure a death more certain than the one Voldemort had nearly dealt him a week before. Harry took out a crinkled tube of antiseptic cream and gingerly applied it to his wound with a Q-tip. He closed his eyes, and imagined Madame Pomfrey's gentle touch. Billowing white curtains in the hospital wing, the scent of herbal potions, clean, starched sheets beneath him...

"This was in your trousers, and it went through the laundry," said Aunt Petunia sternly. Harry's eyes popped open. She was standing in the doorway, proffering a crinkled wrapper at him like it was a dead mouse.

"Sorry" said Harry.

"Don't you go putting chocolate in my washing machine. You'll ruin an entire load. I can't have Dudley's school clothes destroyed, not to mention the machine."

"I'm sorry," he repeated, and took the Chocolate Frog wrapper.

"Do you know how much money these things cost to replace?' Petunia shook her head. With her hair tied up in a scarf and her hands on her hips, she looked for all the world like an angry mother from a 1950s sitcom. "We're not made of money, your uncle and I. This house and everything in it, we worked for."

"I won't do it again," said Harry dully. He wiped the excess cream off his arm and threw the Q-tip into the bin. His scar was starting to hurt again, and he eyed the paracetamol bottle longingly.

"Anyways," said Petunia, "I came up here to tell you you'd better be up by seven tomorrow, because you've got an appointment for nine."

"An appointment for what?"

"Pediatrician," she said.

"At _nine a.m._?" said Harry, incredulously. His forehead, already burning, knit into a grimace. "And I don't need a doctor. I'm _fine_." He moved his cut arm out of her view.

"You missed the 3-in-1 shot last year," said Petunia. "You'd have had it already but for those... _people_...the ones who destroyed the living room." She nearly spat the last few words. "No warning, and I had to cancel the appointment last minute."

Harry thought warmly of the Weasleys, of Fred and George and Arthur bursting through the fireplace without warning.

"I'll cancel it myself," said Harry. "I don't need it."

Petunia shook her head. "Don't be childish, of course you do. You want to get lockjaw? Polio? Don't expect Vernon and I to push you around in an iron lung the rest of your life."

Harry fought hard to restrain himself from rolling his eyes.

"I don't _need_ it," he said, gritting his teeth, "because w—people...like _me_ don't get polio and all that. Alright?"

"Spare me that nonsense. I know perfectly well your kind is not immortal. Your mother proved that."

Harry clapped a hand to his scar, feeling it burn like a hot poker, rousing his temper into a fury. "My mum didn't die from lockjaw. She was _murdered._ "

"Whereas you'd be happy to die of your own stupidity!" exclaimed Petunia shrilly. " _Sixteen_ ear infections, the first year I had you—sixteen. You were on antibiotics practically until two. We wore earplugs around the house all day because the crying was enough to put anyone in the madhouse."

"So what?" Harry said challengingly, although a voice in his head that sounded an awful lot like Hermione was telling him that, perhaps, he _was_ being a bit stupid about this. It was really just a booster shot...

" _So_ , you can spare me this absolute claptrap about your kind not getting sick. I know you get sick. And you spread it, too. More than enough times, you've gotten Dudley sick."

"If Dudley's had his boosters, it wouldn't make a difference whether I did," said Harry, screwing the cap back onto the antiseptic. He knew it was a stupid argument and that Aunt Petunia probably had a point about the ear infections...it was just that Harry didn't want to get up at seven in the morning on summer holiday, and he didn't want the doctor asking questions about the knife wound on his arm, and mostly it was that the thought of letting another stranger touch him made him want to curl up into a ball and vomit.

"You never fail to impress me with how ungrateful you are," said Petunia. "To think, I went to all this trouble to make an appointment for you, when you're plenty old enough to make it yourself."

"I didn't ask for it."

"And I was even going to give you a lift," she continued. Spite dripped from her words. "You can forget about that now, just take the bus. Or walk."

"Fine!" snapped Harry, and he slammed the medicine cabinet shut harder than intended. Petunia flinched at the loud _bang._ "I didn't want a lift, anyway ."

"Well, you aren't getting one!" shouted Petunia, and she spun around and headed to the stairs. Downstairs, cabinets opened and slammed. "Spoiled, ungrateful brat!" she yelled.

Harry leaned forward and pressed his warm forehead against the mirror. When he leaned back, there was a greasy smear on the glass.

He closed and locked the bathroom door, sat down on the toilet with his his trousers pooled about his socked feet. Harry wondered why his ankles were so dirty, but when he squinted at them, he saw that it was just the hair on his shins, looking darker than usual.

Muffled yelling from downstairs. Dudley and Petunia, or possibly Petunia on the phone.

In a plastic basket, Harry saw a magazine—the only reading material in the bathroom. He picked it up. It was Laura Ashley's summer 1995 catalogue. Petunia ordered them religiously. On the front cover, a model Harry vaguely recognized sat in a stone alcove. The ancient bricks reminded him of Hogwarts. How he longed to be sitting in the window seat of the Gryffindor common room, flipping through a Quidditch mag, snacking on sweets from Honeydukes! The bathrooms at Privet Drive were so sterile Harry worried about leaving brown marks all over the floor if he even thought about using the toilet.

He paged through the magazine. Women in ankle-length floral dresses, moody landscapes, the occasional mother-daughter photo in matching cardigans. A million variations on the same straw hat. Slippers for sale in twelve different colours, here referred to as "berry tones." He turned the page and stared at a model in a loose blouse and espadrilles. She was standing on a beach, and her red hair was wavy and loose, blowing in the wind around her. Tanned legs and freckles like the fine dust of spray paint from a distance.

Harry felt strange, like he knew her. His green eyes traced her silhouette, the skirt billowing in the wind, the long, slender fingers. The model's eyes were crinkled small from the pressure of her smiling cheeks. He wondered why her smile felt private, like it belonged to the two of them alone. He gazed at the photo for a long time, until he was finished his business, and got up to flush the toilet and wash his hands.

Harry retreated to his bedroom, but when his foot hit the seam between the hallway carpet and bare hardwood, he spun around and returned to the bathroom. The Laura Ashley catalogue rolled up in his fist like a Persian rug hiding an Egyptian princess. Back in his bedroom, he closed the door, stashed the catalogue under his bed. He put two treats in Hedwig's cage, bribing her into silence. Not that she would ever tell; Hedwig was a good owl. Harry laid down on his bed, feeling the pressure of the mattress against his injured arm. He wondered what Voldemort could be doing right at that second, and smiled when he thought of a matching Laura Ashley catalogue in the bleach-white hands of his nemesis.


	3. violent

**_what did we ever do to these guys_ **

**_that made them so violent?_ **

**Weezer, "Buddy Holly"**

_The newspaper!_ thought Harry, and he popped up. His feet hit the cold floor by his bed. Why hadn't it occurred to him? Surely, the killings must have started—or at least, the disappearances. Muggle houses burning, or suspicious explosions...surely he would know when he saw the news, he would see the connections.

The light was pale, casting stripes across his ceiling from the window blinds. Harry checked the digital alarm clock— 6:57. Numbers glowing green as a curse cutting through the night. If he could get the newspaper now, he would probably have time to check it for news of Voldemort before the Dursleys even rose. Vernon usually went downstairs at half-seven, which left him plenty of time...

He rushed downstairs, careful to land on his tiptoes, trying not to wake the Dursleys. He opened the door and picked up the _Daily Mail_ from the welcome mat, paged through it looking frantically for mysterious deaths and unexplained disasters. But there was nothing but celebrity scandals, and pictures of parched lawns and wilted gardens. Harry wondered if the drought might be connected to Voldemort. Did he really have the power to stop rain? What about the heat wave? He would have to write to Sirius and ask about it.

On the fifth page, he saw a photograph that looked more relevant. Bombed out flats, grey rubble, wrecked cars like crumpled paper—yes, this must be it—but then he saw the unpronounceable names, the map inset into the bottom right-hand corner of the photo. Sarajevo again. Maybe Aunt Petunia had a point about Hogwarts...why hadn't they heard anything about this mysterious war? Surely there must be wizards in Bosnia too. It was probably something Hermione knew about...

Harry flipped through the entire newspaper, seeing nothing else of interest. He paused on the horoscopes near the back page, thinking of Trelawney and her smoke-filled room, the silver ladder dangling like a wind chime. He heard a tinkling sound and looked up. A teenage girl was stopped in the street, her small dog pulling on the lead in her hand. She was giggling at him, her hand covering her mouth. Her blonde hair was braided neatly into cornrows.

Harry glanced down at himself and discovered, to his horror, that he had gone outside in only his underpants. He froze in place, mortification burning his skin like gasoline and the _incendio_ charm. This was worse than the basilisk, worse than the dragons, worse even than the graveyard.

The girl laughed and yanked on her dog's lead, pulling it along across the street. Harry spun on his feet, slammed the front door shut, dropped the newspaper at his feet. He was ready for death. Where was Voldemort, where was Pettigrew, where was the green flash? _If it has to happen, make it now_ , thought Harry frantically. He raced upstairs, shut himself in his room, dove under his blanket. It was hot and stuffy in his room and intolerable under the blanket—that was why Harry had stripped down to his pants in the first place. But now, Harry could not tell whether it was himself or the room that was burning hot.

For lack of anything better to do, he decided to distract himself with homework. He pulled out a transfiguration textbook and re-read the same paragraph ten times, uncomprehending. If the girl was a neighbour, he might actually have to see her again. She _might not be a neighbour,_ he tried to tell himself, but who took their dog for an early morning walk outside their neighbourhood? And what if she told her friends? Girls always told their friends stuff like that, he remembered the way Cho walked in a giggling pack, always surrounded by heads thrown back in laughter. The jingle of her Pygmy Puff keychain. There was nothing to be done, thought Harry, except go back to Hogwarts and never return to the Muggle world ever again. It would have been a more comforting thought if the memory of Cho didn't make him think of Cedric, and the grass turning shadow-blue in twilight, and the Cup's two triumphant handles, each the shape of a question mark.

He gave up on the transfiguration textbook and dragged himself out of bed. Harry dressed in a t-shirt and baggy cargo shorts handed down from Dudley. The shorts had a military camouflage pattern that felt faintly ridiculous and embarrassing, especially after viewing the bombed out flats in the photograph, and he briefly considered just throwing them out. But they were Harry's only shorts, and it was much too hot for long jeans.

He opened Hedwig's cage and took her water dish out to be refilled. In the bathroom, he heard the muffled rap music and slamming of drawers that indicated Dudley's awakening. It made Harry half-smile. Like all respectable white teenage males from Tory-voting English suburbs, Dudley listened religiously to gangsta rap.

"Turn that racket off!" yelled Vernon from the master bedroom. "Godawful thug noise..." In response, Dudley must have kicked the stereo, for the music stopped with a loud _thud_.

Harry placed Hedwig's ceramic water bowl on the bathroom counter, and reached for a toothbrush. His reflection in the mirror snagged his attention. Before he was eleven, Harry had always thought of his face as his alone; the wide green eyes and unfixable hair set him apart from the Dursleys, and the scar marked him, as unique amongst his classmates. Then he met Hagrid, and Dumbledore and the other teachers, and they took his features apart as if to clean them and return them to their rightful owners. These eyes are your mother's, this face is your father's, in your scar is our tragedy written and you belong to us because of it. _We will protect you_. Harry pressed an index finger to the mirror. To whom did the redness around his nostrils belong? The congealed sleep in his eyelashes? The fuzz on his upper lip? The roundish pink marks where his glasses pressed against his cheeks? Did his face really change so quickly after that night in the graveyard, or was he only noticing it now because the graveyard had made him painstakingly aware of the way his skin didn't seem to fit his body anymore, of the way each morning split him open down the seam of his navel?

Harry brushed his teeth quickly. His gums were bleeding. Hermione once said that that meant you had to brush more, or brush better, or something like that. Hermione said her parents had a clock timer in the bathroom and you had to set it to sixty seconds before you started brushing. In their first year, she had had a yellow toothbrush with Tweety Bird on it; Harry saw it when Hermione explained about the Tooth Fairy. It occurred to Harry that Petunia must have brushed Harry's teeth for him when he was very small, but he couldn't remember such a thing, and it seemed impossible to imagine.

"HARRY!" yelled Aunt Petunia from downstairs. "COME DOWN AND HELP ME WITH BREAKFAST."

"I'm coming!" he shouted back. In the kitchen, Petunia wordlessly handed him a bottle of nonstick cooking spray and a fish slice. Particles of hot grease splattered his glasses as he fried the pancakes.

Petunia fiddled with the mini-TV on the counter, flipping from channel to channel.

"New formula Dermacare with natural lipids helps your skin—" 

Harry placed the pancakes on a platter and brought them to the table. He set out plates for himself and the Dursleys—always the biggest one for Uncle Vernon, the tiny blue plate for Petunia (colour and size chosen for maximum appetite suppression), a commemorative plastic plate from a wrestling tournament for Dudley, and the unbreakable melamine plate for himself. 

"The princess has sequestered herself away from the news media at Kensington Palace, where she continues to—"

"Bloody disgraceful, that's what that woman is," said Uncle Vernon, bustling through the doorway. He grabbed three pancakes off the platter and stabbed them with his fork. "An embarrassment to the country."

"Well, it's a sordid situation to say the least," said Aunt Petunia, untying her apron. She sat down at the breakfast table and primly placed a single pancake on her own plate. 

"That woman," said Vernon, gesticulating with his fork, "is responsible for the near collapse of a proud British institution. Not to mention the mockery of marriage—"

"He made a mockery of their marriage too," pointed out Petunia. "A complete disgrace to the Queen." 

"There was nothing wrong with that family until _she_ came into the picture," argued Vernon. "Ever since she married him, it's been scandals here, headlines all over the place, and she baits the paparazzi, we all know that." He drenched his pancakes in syrup and took an enormous bite. "And that other woman too, , Duchess of what's-it, running off with a divorce. I never found that woman attractive _at all_ , I'll tell you that. Red hair's never been appealing on a woman. Makes her look like Pippi Longstocking."

"York," said Petunia. "The Duchess of York." 

Harry, who had never even heard of the Duchess of York before, and certainly could not pick her out of a police line-up, felt a sudden burst of affection for this woman that Vernon Dursley so hated.

"Whatever's gotten into this country?" said Vernon, banging his fork against the table. "There's no respect for the institution of marriage anymore."

Petunia patted her mouth with her napkin. "Just imagine the children. All this humiliation in the press, and them away at boarding school, with no one to turn to—"

Harry could not suppress his laughter. He choked on a bit of pancake and coughed hard into his napkin.

"Something funny, boy?" barked Vernon. 

Harry shook his head, and Dudley appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in his usual extremely baggy jeans and muscle shirt.

"Pull up your trousers," barked Vernon. 

Dudley rolled up his eyes, but he obeyed.

Petunia jumped out of her seat to stack pancakes onto Dudley's plate and fetch coffee. "I made pancakes love, your favourite." ( _I_ made pancakes? thought Harry.) "Don't get up, here, I'll get you some sliced banana."

"I don't want banana," grumbled Dudley. "Mum, get out of my face. Hey, Harry, did you know there's a song about you?"

Harry ignored Dudley, studiously cutting up his pancake into tiny pieces and eating them, one at a time. If Petunia and Vernon hadn't been present, he might have played along for a bit, let Dudley set up an insult and come back with a far cleverer one. Might even have enjoyed it.

" _Ooweeoo, I look just like Buddy Holly_ ," sang Dudley in a grotesque falsetto.

"He does a bit, doesn't he?" commented Vernon, smiling underneath his mustache. "You know, his father did too, at least the one time we met. Dorky. Big glasses, like he couldn't see past about there." He held up a beefy hand to just beyond his eyebrows.

Harry's grip tightened on his fork. Petunia's smile was faltering. She dumped chopped fruit onto Vernon and Dudley's plates as if to distract them.

"I can't believe you _met_ Harry's dad," laughed Dudley. "It feels like he's been dead, like, forever." 

"Alright, you don't need to talk about my dad," said Harry through gritted teeth.

"I agree," said Vernon, to Harry's surprise. "There's no need for another irresponsible weirdo in this house—"

"Harry, go upstairs and get ready for your appointment!" snapped Petunia. She made a hand gesture as if to shoo him.

"I'm _already_ ready." Harry shoved another forkful of pancake into his mouth and chewed it, in spite.

"Then go clean your room. I went to collect the linens last night and it's starting to smell." 

"Then don't go in it!" Harry snapped at her. The quiet chatter of the television on the counter abruptly shut off, leaving a strange, loud silence in the kitchen. 

Vernon and Petunia looked from the television to Harry, and back to the television. Vernons' face was changing colour, from pink to radish-red to puce. A vein bulged in his temple. Harry realized he'd best make it out of the Dursley home before Vernon exploded. He took off, running upstairs to grab his bag. He took the stairs down two at a time, and slammed the front door behind him. Harry didn't stop running until he reached the pavement.

His heart was racing, his lungs gasping for air as though he'd just completed some act of athletic endurance. Harry wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, wincing when his fingernails grazed his scar. The street seemed to prickle and shimmer, each identical brown house briefly rippling like the world was brought to him by a bad TV signal. Harry blinked. There was Number Nine, curtains closed and lawn neatly mowed, as always, and there was Number Five, where the triplet girls left plastic doll furniture all over the grass. The streetlights were plastered with signs begging for information on a missing cat.

Harry trudged off down the pavement, his bag slung over his shoulder. His shoes pressed into the black circles of ancient chewing gum spotting the cement like tiny planets.


	4. mad

**_can't go mad, ain't got time_ **

**Supergrass, "Alright."**

The bus, shuddering along, and Harry's head banging against the glass... rooftops and parks passed by beneath him like little Monopoly properties. Harry didn't take the bus often anymore, but when he did, he sat on the top floor, where he was closest to the sky. When his head bashed hard against the glass, he woke up, disoriented, with a saliva trail down his chin. He wiped his face quickly. Two elderly women sitting with their grocery bags were staring at him; so was a teenaged boy pocketing a GameBoy.

"Are you alright, dear?" asked the first old woman. 

"Fine," muttered Harry, getting out of his seat. He grasped the pole to support himself; though the bus was stopped at a red light, he felt unsteady on his feet.

"Are you sure?" asked the other woman, who was wearing her hair in rollers covered by a clear shower cap. "You were crying something out—"

"Sounded bad," commented the teen boy, and he shrugged. The bus started to move again.

"I'm _fine_ ," Harry repeated, but his voice had gone high-pitched and squeaky and for the second time that day, Harry wanted to die. It was an eternity for the bus to travel another two blocks, to Harry's stop; he climbed down the stairs to the lower level and disembarked like a disgraced politician perp-walking into a courthouse. When the stoplight turned green, the bus finally discharged a belly full of exhaust and the doors swung shut and Harry's humiliating ordeal had come to an end.

_I'm never sleeping in public ever again_ , thought Harry. (For the reader's information, he would, in fact, sleep in public again.) The health centre was in a two-storey building painted bright white. Harry shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun on the blinding paint.

Inside, he offered his name and medical card to the receptionist, who scanned the card with eyes that appeared bug-like under her oversized glasses.

"Oh yes," she said. "I remember your mum called a few days ago for the appointment." 

"My aunt."

"Right, of course. Have a seat in the waiting area, we'll be right with you. You're a little early."

Harry sat down on a vinyl chair and hunched over, resting his elbows on his knees and his head on his hands. His headache was low-grade, not too painful. Prickles here and there, and a dull heat that never went away. More than the pain, it bothered Harry that he had to be constantly reminded that his scar existed, that the skin, once severed, could not go back to the way it was.

A little boy was playing with a bead maze in the children's area, next to a box of battered-looking toys. The boy's tongue peeked from the corner of his mouth. He focussed on guiding a strand of beads across the curving wires. Harry noticed a black ball in the toy chest with a small white circle on it. He knew at once what it was. A sudden urge propelled him forward, to snatch the Magic 8-Ball out of the chest and return to his seat, hoping none of the other adults in the waiting room had noticed him do it. The little boy stared up at him, but said nothing.

"Mrs. Dunlop," called out a nurse. A young woman holding an infant followed the nurse down the corridor leading to the doctors' offices.

Harry hunched over the Magic 8-Ball furtively. He remembered learning about them first from a television commercial, which Aunt Petunia had shut off mid-sentence. Dudley had whined and wheedled and threw a Rubix Cube at his mother, but Petunia would not turn the TV back on until at least two minutes later.

_Think of a yes-or-no question...a yes-or-no question_... Most of the things he wanted to ask definitely could not be answered in a single word. Questions like, "What in the world is going on?" or "Where is Voldemort and what is he doing?" or, he thought shamefully, "What is _wrong_ with me?" But he settled on, _Is Voldemort gathering new followers again?_ Harry fixed the question in his mind and repeated it mentally, staring at the black ball. He shook it, and watched the bubbles clear from the white aperture.

_Signs point to yes._

Harry blinked. He knew it wasn't really magic, that the answers were really just random... Ron would probably chuck it in the bin with his broken Sneakoscope, though it _had_ turned out that the Sneakoscope wasn't really broken after all. Just horribly non-specific.

_Will I get to be with Ron and Hermione again before July's over?_ he thought, and spun the ball.

_Ask again later._

Harry muttered a profane word to himself, causing the receptionist to raise her eyebrows. He feigned total innocence and look back down at the Magic 8-Ball. 

_You give me a stupid answer, I'll ask you a stupid question,_ Harry thought. _Will Dudley Dursley ever stop being a berk?_ He shook the ball again.

_Better not tell you now._

What kind of an idiotic fortune-teller was this ball supposed to be, anyway? 'Better not tell you now?' Then what was the damn point of the whole ball? It was as stupid as divination, as pointless as Muggle Studies or arithmancy. And to think, Petunia had been afraid of a trifling little Muggle toy.

"Harry Potter?" said a nurse in the doorway, reading off a clipboard.

"I'm coming." Harry dashed to the play area to return the Magic 8-Ball. He could not shake the urge to ask one more stupid question before dropping the ball next to the headless baby doll and the Duplo blocks. He shook the ball violently, and asked, _Has Cedric been buried yet?_

 _Yes,_ said the little white aperture. He dropped it at once, like a hot poker.

The nurse looked perturbed at having had to wait an extra few seconds for Harry. She confirmed Harry's birthdate, address and telephone number while leading him down a corridor lined with white doors. The fire door at the end was dark steel, and an exit sign burned above it. A jolt of fiery pain lashed across Harry's skull, and he froze, one hand clasped to his forehead. He stared at the hallway and the doors that seemed to shrunk and draw closer together towards the hall's end. A cold, eerie sense of déja vu gripped him, and Harry thought at once of Year Six art class, and the lessons on linear perspective...the cascade of lockers he had drawn along lines traced dutifully from a ruler...but what would that have to do with the pain in his scar?

"Harry?" said the nurse. "Is there something wrong?"

"My—migraine," breathed Harry. "I get them...now and then."

"You ought to tell the doctor about that," said the nurse. "Is it in your file?"

"Just eye strain," muttered Harry, and he forced his feet forward, though the image of the fire door and the long corridor were flickering in his mind, superimposed over the opening door to the doctor's examination room. Inside, the nurse instructed him to sit on a paper-lined exam table. Then, she left.

Harry kicked his feet absently; the heels of his trainers hit the cupboard beneath him. He wiggled his toes. There was a hole in one sock, and his trainers were getting tight, but getting Aunt Petunia to agree to buy new shoes for him was going to be an ordeal. On the wall across from him was a diagram of the human body that would have made Aunt Petunia blush. He thought of the dirty joke that Ron would probably whisper to him, if he were here, and how Hermione would kick them both in the shins for it.

"Harry, is it?" asked a young man, standing in the doorway. He was wearing blue scrubs and he carried a clipboard. A badge on his lanyard identified him as Nurse Subramaniam.

"Yeah." 

"Here for your 3-in-1 booster, it says. You're overdue for a checkup, you know."

"I'm just here for the shot," said Harry, defensive.

"It says on your chart that your last checkup was... April, 1991. You're _long_ overdue," said the nurse. "Mum hasn't made an appointment yet?"

"My mum's dead," said Harry. "My aunt makes the appointments. And I go to boarding school. They have a...a doctor, they check me there."

"I'm very sorry to hear that. Not the boarding school, I mean—"

"Yeah, I know." Harry restrained himself from rolling his eyes.

"We'll have to get the file from your school, then," said Nurse Subramaniam. He came towards Harry, who shrunk back instinctively, but the nurse openly opened a drawer in a cabinet adjacent to the exam table. 

"Not fond of needles, are we?" The nurse smiled, revealing blindingly white teeth. "Don't worry, it'll be over in a second."

"I'm fine." Internally, Harry bristled at the implication he could be scared of a tiny needle. He knew it was irrational—that there was no way the nurse knew what he had been through—but _still..._

The nurse put on a pair of latex gloves, and pressed a cotton ball against a bottle of alcohol with a pump top. He came towards Harry, who proffered his left arm. The nurse wiped the wet cotton ball across his bicep. Harry disliked the feeling of the man's gloved fingers on his arm. The latex felt like a facsimile of a hand. A disembodied, fake hand. Harry flinched, felt a wave of nausea roll through his stomach..

"It's alright, now," said Nurse Subramaniam, "I'll tell you when to look away. You'll just feel a pinch. Alright, I'm going to do it now."

Harry made a point of _not_ looking away. The needle didn't hurt. It was in and out in a second, just like the nurse had promised.

"Thanks," said Harry gruffly. He pushed himself off the exam table, scooped up his bag, and was halfway out the door when Nurse Subramaniam exclaimed, "Hang on just a moment, come back here." 

Grudgingly, Harry slumped back into the room. 

"Here, I've got to give you this," said the Nurse, and he opened a cupboard and handed Harry a little box of apple juice. "Get some sugar in your system before you go. You don't feel faint at all, do you?"

"No." Harry unwrapped the straw, stabbed it into the foil-covered hole, and sucked up the entire juice box in a single breath.

"What's that on your arm?" said Nurse Subramaniam, his brow furrowed.

"It's the cotton ball you taped on," Harry said dully.

"No, your right arm."

"Nothing," said Harry, and he pulled his right arm away from the Nurse, who had walked around to Harry's right side to see it.

"Show it to me, please."

"It's just a plaster."

"I just want to make sure it isn't infected," said the nurse, and he grabbed Harry's arm and pushed the sleeve of his T-shirt up. Harry looked away as the nurse carefully peeled off the damp plaster, soaked with anti-septic cream and pus.

"How did this happen?" asked Nurse Subramaniam, his voice hushed and serious. "It looks like a knife wound."

"I fell," mumbled Harry. "There was broken glass."

"You fell."

"Yeah, I did."

"Why was there broken glass where you fell?" asked the nurse, sounding skeptical.

"'Cause someone dropped a bottle, I don't know," Harry complained. "Look, I put anti-septic cream on it, it's not infected."

"Does your arm feel warm where the wound is?" asked the nurse.

It did. "No," said Harry.

"I'm going to press the skin around the wound. You tell me if this hurts." The creepy latex fingers formed a V-shape around Harry's cut. He squinted when the nurse pressed down, watching the skin blanch, feeling the pain pulsating through his upper arm like the vibrato of a bell. 

"It doesn't hurt," said Harry.

"Well..." the nurse pulled back and looked at Harry critically. He had a neat mustache and dark, kindly eyes. Harry didn't want to hate him, he just wanted out.

"I don't want you to put another plaster on it right away. We really want that wound to dry out, not keep it too moist. Try to go without a plaster as long as you can and maybe roll up your sleeve. Can you do that for me?"

"Yeah," muttered Harry. He really didn't want to keep his sleeve rolled up. People were going to stare at the cut, and the Petunia or Dudley would certainly ask about it.

"If the wound changes colour, or if you see any pus coming out, or if it starts bleeding again, you need to go to the walk-in clinic, do you understand?"

"Yeah." 

"We don't want that getting infected. Did you have medical attention when you first received the wound?"

"Yes." Harry remembered the warm tears dripping onto his Acromantula bite, dissolving the pain into sweet nothingness. He thought of Sirius, breathing heavily next to him, and Dumbledore's steeped fingers. He should have gotten some of Fawkes' tears into the wound on his arm, but he hadn't though too—his leg had hurt so much more, and his mind was so muddled, the pain was everywhere and nowhere...he couldn't think of where else he was injured, it was hard to focus—everything seemed to happen all at once and then it was over, he was at the Dursley home, and that's when his right arm had begun to throb, the wound seeping pus through his plaster.

The memories clouded his mind and Harry had to toss his head to shake them off. He realized that the nurse was sliding a pamphlet into his hands. On the front cover, there was a toll-free phone line and a black and white photograph of a young girl on a swing with downcast eyes. In block letters, the headline spelled out _'I WISH I HAD SOMEONE TO TALK TO.'_

"This might be of use to you," said Nurse Subramaniam. "I know it can be hard to, er, to discuss issues of bullying or self-harm—"

"Thanks," Harry interrupted. "I've got to be going—"

"Please have a look at the pamphlet, Harry. It's got some really important phone numbers that you could call, in case there's anything going on in your life that you need to talk to someone about."

"I'm going to be late," Harry said brusquely. "I've, erm, I've got work."

"Is someone picking you up?" asked the nurse, walking Harry out the office door and down the corridor.

"Yeah," he lied, rolling the pamphlet up into a ball in his hands. In the waiting room, another teenage boy had taken his place on the same chair. He was reading _NME_ and his long legs sprawled out before him; something about the boy's blunt buzz cut reminded him of Oliver Wood.

"Good luck, Harry." 

Harry nodded at Nurse Subramaniam. The expression on the man's face irritated Harry; he didn't want some stranger's pity. He didn't want anyone's pity or their dumb platitudes. It was enough to be humiliated by Rita Skeeter in the wizarding world without putting up with it from Muggles too.

On his way to the door, Harry walked by the teenage boy. His magazine was open to a two-page spread about Weezer. The photograph showed the band members leaning against a fence, backlit by the evening sun.

"That group's rubbish," muttered Harry, on a nasty impulse.

The boy looked up at him, one eyebrow raised.

"Better off listening to anything else. Cheers," added Harry, and he yanked open the doors to the vestibule and left before the boy could reply.

The sun was white and the pavement dazzling in the brightness of mid-morning. Harry closed his eyes against the onslaught of light. He spread his arms a little, feeling the warmth on his skin. The dull music of passing traffic fell away into the background. The sun warmed him his body, tanned his skin, dried his wound, cauterized him. He felt more awake than he had in days.

Harry opened his eyes. The suburbs of Surrey clicked back into place like Tetris blocks. A falafel restaurant across the street had a neon sign; it winked at the unemployment office next to the health centre. A plastic bag danced away in the breeze. He watched the bag flutter away, thinking of Hedwig.

Harry unfolded the pamphlet in his hands, smoothed it out against his trousers. He folded it in half, then turn it 90 degrees clockwise, and folded it in half again. He tucked the corners of the sheet into the center point, and smoothed back some flaps and tucked others, shaping the pamphlet into a paper crane. This he had learned in Mr. Van der Sloot's Year Five class, where students who completed their math worksheets early were permitted to choose a geometry activity from the Early Finishers' Loot Bag. Harry's paper crane was scarred with fold marks from its original tri-fold design, but its glossy paper skin shone in the sunlight. He admired his handiwork and held the paper crane up to the sun.

Harry didn't know his paper crane would flutter its wings and take off in the breeze. Honestly, he didn't. When he watched the crane swoop gleefully through the air before coming to rest on a telephone wire, it was with bewilderment. He couldn't remember ever having performed unintentional magic when he wasn't scared or angry. He had heard about this sort of magic before—Fred had told him about turning fruit salad into exploding confetti as a toddler—but he had never done it. Maybe it was one of those wizard things people had forgotten to explain to him. There were an awful lot of those.

The crane hopped a few paces down the telephone wire, then jumped off and soared away. It became a tiny blot, then a pinprick, and then it was gone.

"Damn it," whispered Harry.

He longed for his Firebolt, its leather-padded seat and aerodynamically clipped twigs. As he waited at the bus stop, Harry imagined all the new Quidditch moves he wanted to practice. The Donoghue Dive, the Spinning Spartovski, the Cuckoo Feint, the Bullet. All the means by which he might graze the sky, weightless.


	5. lullaby

**_think i'm going to cry, i don't know why_ **

**_think i'm gonna sing myself a lullaby_ **

**Ani DiFranco, "Cradle and All."**

The day after Harry's booster shot, Petunia had to go to London for a shopping trip and tea with her friends from secretarial school. Dudley was off to Kent for a wrestling tournament. Because they would be out most of the day, Petunia told Harry to get his "weird" homework done while they would not be present to suffer his freakishness. Harry agreed, and then spent most of the morning raiding the fridge and pantry, rearranging the remaining containers to hide whatever was missing.

By noon, his stomach ached something fierce (mostly from the Pop-Tarts), but he was still hungry. He felt like he would always be hungry. Aimlessly, he sat down to write a letter to Ron, but then he couldn't think of anything to say other than 'Get me out of here,' so he tried to watch a sitcom on television instead. Harry could not follow the plot. There were two blonde women who fancied the same man, but he couldn't tell the women apart and the jokes were all pop culture references that Harry wasn't familiar with. The laugh track reminded him of the battering of raindrops against the slate roof of Gryffindor Tower. Harry changed the channel.

"Burmese resistance leader Aung San Suu Kyi is to be released from house arrest at some point in the next week...." Harry's eyes glazed over, only half listening. "As leader of the NLD, Kyi has been a target of the military dictatorship..."

_Unexplained disappearances...murders with no reasonable explanation...come on, something British, give me something_...

"..if we can expect to see change in the political landscape of Burma...in other news, meteorologists predict the warmest summer since 1976, with average daily temperatures...to get your swimming trunks ready! Back to you, Oliver..."

Nothing, yet again. Was it all a mind game? Was he lying low, biding time—or could he cover up his tracks, prevent any of it from getting onto the Muggle news? How powerful actually was he? On that night in the graveyard, Voldemort had seemed awesome and terrible, a force of nature even...the very personification of death...but then, Harry had gotten away, hadn't he?

Harry rolled up into a ball on the fluffy chintz sofa and hugged his knees, which were downy with hair. Harry wondered why his legs looked like someone else's legs. Maybe like his father's legs, not that he remembered what his father's legs looked like, except he had once had a dream about lying on his stomach and trying to pull himself forward by grasping handfuls of shag carpeting. In the dream, Harry was trying to get closer to a pair of legs that looked sort of like the legs that were now attached to his own body, yet retained the discomfiting aura of otherness that made Harry not want to wear shorts anymore. He turned off the TV and lay down on his stomach for a nap.

In the afternoon, Harry made a real effort at digging through the pile of homework intended to prepare him for the rigours of fifth year. It was going to be his OWL year and Hermione had already sent Harry three letters reminding him not to put off all his work until the last possible moment. Of course he would, but out of respect for Hermione, he was going to try to get At Least One Thing done. He chose the easiest assignment, a Charms booklet that included fill-in-the-blank exercises and only a few short answer questions. By four in the afternoon, Harry had finished just enough work to feel he deserved a reward, so he grabbed a bottle of Lucozade from the fridge and listened to music on the kitchen radio, searching through the newspaper for signs of Voldemort's interference until Petunia arrived home. She enlisted him to clean the bathrooms and Hoover upstairs until suppertime.

After dinner, Harry left for his customary evening walk. He stayed on the shady side of the street. It was still hot and dry, even past six in the evening, and the grass on Privet Drive was turning yellow. There had been whispers about metering, which Vernon firmly opposed on the principal that it penalized those who invested in their properties, and rewarded the indolent renters (most notably, those living in the terraced houses on Arboretum Place, which intersected with Privet Drive.) Harry had more tolerance for cold than heat; he longed for a deafening thunderstorm, for rain sloshing out of the eaves troughs. He wanted to watch lightning slice open the sky.

But lightning and rain were not in the cards. Harry walked for an hour and a half, making desultory rounds through the Drives, Places, Crescents and Circles of the subdivision. On Arboretum Place, he saw a flash of electric green in his peripheral vision, and he whipped around, reaching for the wand hidden in his cargo shorts. Harry scanned the street for the green light, tense, but ready for this intrusion into the monotony of Little Whinging.

It was an abandoned tennis ball, rolling down the gutter. Harry's shoulders slumped. He exhaled in many short intervals, waiting for his heart to slow down. Harry approached the ball, checking for any children in the area, but nobody was around. _Finders' keepers, then_. He pocketed the ball and Velcroed the pocket's flap closed against his new treasure. Harry used to have a bouncy rubber ball to play with, but all his old toys had disappeared when he returned from his first year at Hogwarts.

The sky was fading from blue to pink when he reached the dusty playground for the third time that evening. Harry slouched towards the swing set and sat down, dragging his shoes against the sand. Insects hummed. The half-dome climbing frame rose out of the dirt, hulking like the swollen abdomen of an Acromantula. Harry got off the swing and turned around so he wouldn't have to face it. Across from the children's play area was a basketball court. The net was missing, a casualty of Dudley and his gang. Once upon a time, they had hogged the basketball net, playing Bump all summer. They would never give Harry a chance to shoot. These days, they were no longer interested in basketball, except to the extent that they could smoke on the asphalt and prevent younger kids from enjoying the court. But there was nobody on the court now.

Harry slunk onto the court and tore open the Velcro flap. He bounced the filthy tennis ball a few times, enjoying its vigorous return to his hand after smacking the asphalt. Kinetic energy surging through him; Harry, ball, and ground, affixed by repetition and ricochet. He shot for the hoop, but the ball bounced off the backboard and rolled back to him. Harry dribbled the ball and shot again, this time with even less success. He muttered a swear word and tried again.

He continued in his pursuit of the elusive basket as the sky darkened. The sun had almost slipped below the silhouette of identical rooflines when Harry heard a pair of footsteps and a regular drumbeat, gradually increasing in volume, coming from an alley of garages.

"— _ain't no politician, no competition_ _, sending all opposition to see a mortician_..."

_Clever rhyme_ , thought Harry, and then he sighed heavily when he heard a familiar voice saying, "Dunno when they get back, but not before the twentieth."

"That's more than enough time," replied a girl. "Maybe tomorrow night, then?"

Piers Polkiss emerged from the alley, carrying a massive boom box. He was flanked by a teenage girl with two tiny buns on her head, wearing a shrunken crop top and a flowered mini skirt; she was gazing at him with a look of adoration that made Harry want to hex the both of them.

"D'you have drinks at your house?" asked the girl, raising her voice to be heard above the rap song. Piers didn't answer her; he was stared at Harry with a nasty grin on his face, and then whistled the chorus of "Buddy Holly."

"Long time, no see" he said. His voice was just as nasal and rough as it had always been, but it was deeper than Harry had remembered. He seemed to be affecting a lower-class accent as well, one that didn't match Mrs. Polkiss's clipped RP English. "I guess the borstal's been keeping you busy. "

"Oh, it has," said Harry dully. He squeezed the tennis ball.

"To be honest," said Piers as he approached Harry, "I thought a few years of hammering out license plates might have thickened you up a bit. But you're still a bit of a cheese string."

"I don't think they call them borstals anymore, Piers," laughed the girl, and she put an arm on his bicep.

"Detention centres, or whatever," Piers shook her off. He pulled a package of cigarettes out of his back pocket and offered one to Harry. "Care for a smoke?"

"No thanks," said Harry, backing away.

"Do they not have fags at the fag school?" said Piers. His girlfriend handed Piers a pink lighter, and he stuck a cigarette between his teeth and cupped the flame before him. A curve of smoke escaped between his fingers. "Dursley said they shook you up good this year. I almost wish I could have been there. Are you _reformed_ yet?"

Harry bounced the tennis ball before him, daring Piers to react. He wanted to leave but he wanted to stay too; here was the very possibility of a fight, the potential for an explosion, and it rooted him to the asphalt. He had his wand with him, hidden beneath his shirt, but he had no intention of using it; and the Ministry of Magic did not track fist usage, so far as Harry knew.

"What's the matter?" Piers taunted, after spitting out a mouthful of smoke. "Cat got your tongue?"

Harry raised a skeptical eyebrow. 

"Come on, baby, can we just go?" asked Piers' girlfriend. "This is pointless, he can hardly talk."

"It's alright, love," he assured her, "he's a bit slow."

"Say that again," said Harry.

"Piers, let's go. I want a drink." 

"Say what again?" Piers asked. He stepped closer to Harry and smiled, revealing a row of braces like dirty railroad tracks.

"You _know_ what," said Harry calmly. "Say it again."

"Alright, then," said Piers. "You're slow. _Sloooow_ ," he repeated, dragging out the word. "

"That's interesting," breathed Harry, just low enough that Piers' girlfriend could not hear him. "Because you're the one who's been hanging off my cousin the last ten years like he was the Second Coming. Gave yourself a buzzcut this year just to match ickle Dudley, didn't you? And I really can't think of anyone much stupider than him. Except maybe—" and at this, Harry cocked his head to the side and looked up, as if to consider his options—" _one_ bloke."

" _Keep their heads ringing!_ " blared the boombox, just as Piers' elbow missed Harry's jaw by a fraction of an inch; for even if Harry was not the brightest student of his year—and he certainly was not— he was _fast_ , and he dashed to the swingset, waiting by the metal structure, baiting Piers. His girlfriend whooped and clapped at the fight before her, and Piers came running after Harry, who ducked at just the right moment so that Piers' own fist smashed against the metal pole. As Piers yelled out a string of profanities, Harry threw his head back and laughed like he hadn't since before the twilight in the graveyard had swallowed him whole.

"Get him, Pierie!" shouted the girl, tugging her miniskirt back down her thighs.

Harry instinctively blocked his head with his crossed forearms but then he heard a repulsive _sizzle_ and felt something red hot against the tender skin beside his navel; Piers had taken advantage of Harry's momentary blindness to yank up his t-shirt, and press his smouldering cigarette against Harry's belly, a few inches away from his tucked wand.

"ARE YOU EFFING MAD?" screeched Harry. "Get the hell off me!" And he kicked Piers in the groin, as hard as he could. Piers dropped and rolled away with a violent moan. His girlfriend came running and fell to her knees by Piers's side. When she leaned over him to caress his head, her crop top rode up to expose an incandescent bra.

"Ughh..." sighed Piers, cupping his nether regions in disgust. "Damn it...."

Harry hunched over to probe his wound; it wasn't that serious, just a red circle and a few hairs burnt to fine little roots. He pulled his t-shirt down and swept his sweaty fringe out of his eyes and away from his scar, which was still prickling.

"Are you really in reform school?" asked the girlfriend, looking up from Piers to give Harry an appraising look that wasn't entirely negative. She raised her heavily plucked eyebrows to give Harry a once over.

"Why don't you ask your little pyromaniac boyfriend over there," muttered Harry.

Piers, still groaning in agony, showed Harry his middle finger.

"You're a good fighter," said the girl. 

"Shut up, Chelsea," said Piers. "Jesus, that hurt."

"Yeah, maybe think about that next time you decide to be an idiot," said Harry dryly. He bounced his tennis ball on the asphalt, making his way over to the climbing frame several yards away. He scampered up and sat on the top of the half-dome, surveying the scene of Piers' defeat from above like a disinterested god. Piers rolled onto his side and wretched onto the ground. The rap song's bass line continued to vibrate through the ground, though Harry could not hear the lyrics from this distance.

It took Piers a long time to finish over-dramatizing his injury; when he finally made a big show of easing his way up to a standing position, Chelsea took him by the hand and led him to the swing set. Piers sat down on the one remaining swing not wrapped by its chain around the swing's frame; Chelsea came towards him and leaned in for a kiss. Harry watched her long fingernails stroking the peach fuzz of Piers' buzz cut. Her twin buns bobbed in the air above her like buoys on the surface of a pool. His hand was on her cheek. Harry felt his bottom sliding out from between the two metal bars supporting his weight. He pulled himself back up, eyes glued to the coupling before him with a mix of emotions he could not name. His hands were sweaty on the bars.

"Stop that," giggled Chelsea, swatting at Piers' hand reaching for her miniskirt.

One by one, the streetlights blinked on; Harry would have to get home, or face Vernon's wrath. He dropped his body down from the climbing frame, still hanging on by his hands. Gravity pulled at him, his loose shorts sliding across his hips. He let go and his feet touched asphalt. Falling felt right, like everything still made sense because there was a constant, there was gravity. Most of the time.

When Harry passed Piers and Chelsea on his way out of the park, she snorted with laughter and Piers spat at him, missing by a foot when Harry dodged the flying wad.

"Piss off, Peeping Tom," said Piers.

"I'm not the one who just about pissed himself, _Pierie_ ," said Harry, restraining himself from giving the boombox a decent kick. He dashed into the alleyway before Piers could reply, sick of his smarmy face and his godawful fake accent. Why did girls always like the worst blokes? Like Pansy, for instance—always trailing after Malfoy with that nauseating look of admiration on her face. Was there something in the water that made girls only want idiots?

_But Cedric wasn't an idiot and Cho fancied him_ , thought Harry as he rounded the corner of Privet Drive. He pushed the thought back down, underneath the pile of unwanted memories he trampled on like so many autumn leaves. The house lights at Number Four were on, and Uncle Vernon was peeking through the living room window. Great.

"WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?!" he thundered as soon as he opened the door. He grabbed Harry by the collar and dragged him inside. "HOW MANY TIMES DO —DO _WE_ HAVE TO TELL YOU THAT YOU ARE TO BE HOME BEFORE DARK?"

"Vernon, hush, the neighbours can hear," hissed Petunia. She wiped rubber-gloved hands on her apron. "You're so late we've already eaten dinner—"

"It's not even fully dark," protested Harry.

"Keep back talking boy, and you'll find out what 'fully dark' is back in that cupboard," said Vernon, approaching Harry until Harry backed himself against the wall. He bumped into a family picture and felt the frame go crooked behind him.

"You are to be home no later than Dudley," said Petunia. "We have made that clear."

Gritting his teeth, Harry argued, "How'm I supposed to know when Dudley gets home if we're not together?" 

"Because Dudley is home before the streetlights come on!" said Petunia shrilly. 

"This is the smart-aleck stuff, the backtalk, the _DIS-re-SPECT_ I was talking about, Petunia," said Vernon. "I said it would get worse, and look. It has."

Petunia sighed heavily, closing her eyes. She peeled off one yellow glove, and then the other. Harry noticed the fine network of wrinkles spreading from the corner of her eyes.

"You'll go without dinner tonight," Vernon said nastily. "And you pull this stunt again, it'll be no breakfast the next day either. Go up to bed. NOW."

"I don't know why you care so much when I get home, seeing as—" 

"BED. NOW!"

"Fine!"

Harry slid sideways against the wall, attempting to get away from Vernon, but Petunia pulled him to the side. 

"Not yet," she said. "You're not getting out of your chores just because of this. The hampers are full. Go load the washing machine and put the soap in." Petunia sighed. "You'll be the death of me."

Harry nodded, and Petunia retreated with Vernon to the living room. Harry sulked his way to the laundry room, pulling off his too-small trainers as he went. He tied the laces together and hung the shoes off his forearm, the way he had seen some athletic shoes dangling from telephone wires. Hermione had once said that she had read that drug dealers hung shoes from these wires to mark their territory, or something like that. It seemed unlikely, but if Hermione said it, it must be true.

" _Oof!_ " He'd bumped into Dudley on his way into the laundry room.

"Get off me!" complained Dudley. He dashed through the doorway ahead of Harry, carrying an armload of something light blue and bunched up—maybe sheets or towels? What was odd was that Harry had never seen Dudley go into the laundry room before. Never in his life had Dudley filled the washing machine or moved the clothes to the dryer and he had certainly never folded his own clothes.

Dudley slammed the laundry room door shut in Harry's face. There was a click; Harry grabbed doorknob and jiggled it, but it was locked.

"Hey!" he complained. "I need to start the machine!"

"Piss off!" came a muffled voice. There was something odd in Dudley's tone, like a quavering or a tremour.

"What—" Harry banged on the door a few times, but it would not budge. He reached for his wand and froze, remembering that he could not use it.   


"Dudley, open the door!" he called out. He banged on it a few more times and nearly fell forward when Dudley finally opened the door.

"What are you doing?"

"Just screw off," muttered Dudley, pushing past Harry. His cheeks were pinker than usual. 

Harry watched Dudley stalk upstairs with mild interest. When Dudley disappeared, he went into the laundry room to complete his task.

The soap flakes smelled strongly of pine needles and lye. Harry was overtaken briefly by a sense memory from Year Two or Three. He was still wetting the bed multiple times a week at that point. Petunia made him load his sheets into the washing machine and complete the load separately from everyone else's laundry, lest he soil the whole family's clothes. It was usually one or two in the morning, and he would stand barefoot in his pajamas on the stepping stool to reach the cupboard with the laundry soap, and then he would listen to the rhythmic pounding of the washing machine. He liked the sound, but his feet were so cold, that's what he remembered most.

Harry poured the cup of soap flakes into the tray. It was half a lifetime ago.

They were definitely Dudley's sheets, now that he thought of it. They were definitely...

He set the timer and the machine began to vibrate and purr like the chest of a Hippogriff. He touched the cool metal and thought of Buckbeak, and then, with a sense of warmth spreading through his chest, of Sirius, hearing his story and laughing.


	6. fridge

**_i don't want to be your food or the light from the fridge on your face  
at midnight, hey_ **

**_what are you hungry for?_ **

**Alanis Morissette, "Not The Doctor"**

A strange cry jolted him awake; he shot up in bed and reached blindly for the source of the noise through streaks of orange light. Harry exhaled slowly, and looked down at his hands, clenched into fists. There had been a doorknob twisting in his right hand, he was sure of it. But when he tried to recall the dream, or perhaps the nightmare, he could not remember anything else but the dark line articulating the door from its frame.

He managed to locate his crooked glasses and shove them onto the bridge of his nose, all before his pounding heart had slowed. _Beat, beat, beat._ It was still the middle of the night; the orange light was from the sodium streetlights leaking through the bars of his window. Dust particles slow-danced in the strange glow. Harry rubbed his face. His cheeks were wet. His eyes were raw. 

"Coo," murmured a gentle voice from the corner of the room.

"Hedwig," Harry replied, quiet and serious.

"Coo."

He didn't speak, but nodded at her. She knew how to unlatch the door of her own cage by manipulating the lock with a stick in her mouth. She flew across the room and landed in his lap. Her soft feathers tickled him. She nipped him on the chin.

Harry pressed his damp forehead against her head and breathed in the sweet, musky bird scent. He stroked her back and her wings, and then she cocked her head to the side. He knew that she had excellent night vision, and could see him perfectly well in the dark. 

Hedwig cawed softly. Harry rubbed her downy belly, touched the bumpy, rubbery skin of her talons. She nudged his chin with her head. He closed his eyes and thought of Scabbers and of Peter Pettigrew, and then of Rita Skeeter as a beetle, trapped in a jar. What if Hedwig wasn't really an owl? What would he do, how could he manage, when she had seen him this way? When he had held her like this?

"Hedwig," he whispered. "Please don't be an Animagus." 

She nibbled on his t-shirt in response. 

"I know it's dumb." It was like talking to himself, except that he knew, on some level, she understood him perfectly. They sat together on his bed for several more minutes. She looked around his bedroom with her giant amber eyes, taking in the dark smudges of clothing on the floor and textbooks scattered across the dresser.

Finally, Harry carried Hedwig back to her cage. She bit his finger gently when he latched the door shut. Harry picked up a piece of parchment from his desk, and sharpened his quill with a pen-knife. Tiny wedges of old quill fell to the carpet. He turned on a lamp and began to write.

_Dear Ron,_

What to say. He had questions, but Ron's letter from a few days ago said the mail wasn't secure. He had warned Harry not to refer to anything sensitive in a letter.

_I'm_

But what was he?

_~~I'm so bored~~_

That was a stupid thing to say in a letter. He scratched the ink off the parchment and began again.

_Dear Ron,_

_I want to know when I_

(Except that Ron said that he didn't know when Harry could come over, that the adults said they would only tell him last minute.)

_I hope you're well. Privet Drive is_

"I hope you're _well_?" Harry muttered, disgusted. Since when did he speak that formally to _Ron_ , of all people? It's not like he was writing a letter to Cho. His forehead fell into his hands, and he realized his scar was hurting again, like a seam torn open. His thoughts were falling out through the tear.

Harry sat back in his chair. The house was so quiet he could hear the dull buzz of inert appliances, sucking power through their electrical cables. He thought of the laundry room and winced at the memory. Maybe Dudley was sleeping on his bare mattress; he could hardly imagine Dudley making his bed all by himself.

It was hot upstairs. The air pressed against him, oppressive as a swelling balloon.

Harry abandoned his letter. The door to his room barely creaked when he pulled it open, gentle as a mouse. He padded downstairs, barefoot, thinking of cold water and the tinkle of ice cubes against a glass. Bluish light spilled through the hallway. He paused in the doorway to the kitchen, silent.

There was a dark silhouette against the cold glow of the refrigerator. The door was open. Harry felt the chill sweep through him. The silhouette unblurred, resolved itself into a woman in a bra and underpants, leaning against the vegetable crisper. Her head down, blonde hair falling limply into the white abyss. His aunt Petunia.

Harry's mouth formed the letter 'O.'

She obviously had not heard him. It was not the pose of a person who sees themselves in the eyes of others. She breathed in a deep sigh, raising her shoulders slightly, and at that moment, Harry felt as though he inhabited her body, saw the cartons of milk through her own eyes, felt the delicious cold air drying her armpits.

Then she looked up. He tried to avert his eyes but it was too late, she had seen him, their eyes met just long enough, was it a second or an hour that they looked at each other? The fridge light dancing off her pupils, underlining the half-circle beneath her eyes. Cold light. 

"Upstairs is too—" she started to say, at the same moment as Harry said, "I just—"

But he did not continue, just turned around and dashed upstairs, two steps at a time. Went into the bathroom, locked the door. He crouched in the shower-bath, turned on the faucet, and let the cold water tickle his feet. Harry touched two fingers to the stream and wiped some water onto his forehead. Wetness trickled down into his eyebrows. A baptism.


	7. spotlight

**_that's me in the corner_ **

**_that's me in the spotlight_ **

**REM, "Losing My Religion."**

Harry's fingers were grey with ink. He tried wiping them off on his white t-shirt, but that only left a dark smear down the front, with no change to the discoloration of his fingertips. The broadsheets of the _Daily Prophet_ were spread out before him on his bedroom floor. Bold capital letters with elaborate serifs; the old-fashioned lead type that had once excited Harry with its promise of secret worlds. The ultimate escape. Harry was on his hands and knees, scanning every last column of the newspaper for news of Cedric's burial. He could find nothing but a single, subtle reference to "the tragic event that took place at Hogwarts this past year" in a lifestyle article about how wizarding families needed to get back to spending quality time together, instead of consuming Quidditch mags and _Witch Weekly_ and Floo-calling their friends from separate bedrooms.

Was Harry going mad, or was it the rest of the bloody world? Had everyone just forgotten that _Voldemort_ was back? Was nobody else going to acknowledge that a person who, just last year, had been a charismatic, athletic, and well-liked, Hogwarts prefect, was now _dead_? Had the sleepy white numbness spreading through Harry infected the rest of the world as well?

The noxiously poppy theme tune from _Grange Hill_ snuck in through the walls like a trail of ants; Dudley was watching TV too loudly in his room again. Harry disliked that show, not because he had ever seen it, but because the Dursleys had never let him watch a single episode, irrationally insisting that it was "too inappropriate" for Harry (yet somehow, perfectly fine for Dudley.) There was a voice in Harry's head, a voice somewhat like Hermione's, that told him he was getting too old to hate people and stories and places he never knew, on the basis of their tangential connections to his childhood resentments. Sometimes it wasn't even a voice, just a vague, queasy sensation in Harry's belly, like he'd eaten too many sour keys or stepped in something slimy—the dawning horror of self-awareness, and its thousand tiny pinpricks of shame and regret. The stifling middle-of-the-night wakefulness, always sending one trickle of sweat down the small of his back. The problem was that the voice, or the queasiness, or whatever it was, could not very well compete against the loud insistence in Harry's mind that everyone who liked _Grange Hill_ or PlayStation or _RoboCop_ was stupid because Dudley liked _Grange Hill_ and PlayStation and _RoboCop._

Harry reached the crossword puzzle and classified advertisements on the last page of the _Prophet_. Nothing. He tore a long, vertical strip from the newspaper out of sheer frustration; the face of a smiling wizard was bisected. Scarred down the middle. The wizard moved his head away from the tear, frowning at it briefly before rearranging his features back into featureless joy. It didn't seem fair that the people in the photos could so easily escape their fate; Harry tried to tear a strip of paper diagonally, right across the page, but the paper grain was strong, and redirected his efforts into another vertical tear. His hands were flying now, pinching and ripping, movements as fluid and automatic as a blind knitter. The paper was turning into a bird's next before him. Specks of dust floating up, flashing gold in the July sun. When there was nothing left but a mess of white and black and dark fingerprints before him, Harry bunched up the paper bits and shoved them through the bars of Hedwig's cage, to line the tray. She urinated peacefully in her sleep.

The day wore on like old tires rubbing against asphalt. Harry cleaned his glasses with paper towel. Then he was scolded for using the expensive absorbent brand, and not toilet paper. Petunia sent him back upstairs with Windex and a rag, to clean the bathrooms. She said there would be bleach and baking soda for the toilets in the cabinet under the sink of the master bath. The mauve laminate cabinets felt sweaty to his touch. He knelt down. Inside the cabinet were several spray bottles, a Mason jar of baking soda and a packet of pine tree-shaped air fresheners, but where was the bleach? Harry's bony knees pressed against the tiled floor, as though in supplication; he reached about deep inside the cabinet, pulling out several boxes to make way for the bleach at the back. He rescued the bleach bottle and only then did he notice the blur of turquoise and royal blue boxes at his feet. Harry had known the TAMPAX logo since one recess in Year Five, when Ryan Zheng had peeled open his fist like a trembling tulip . On his palm was the mysterious white tube that Ryan had nicked from his teenage sister. All the boys had crowded around in gleeful disgust as Ryan explained what seemed so hideous, so impossible. The susurration of male hisses and groans and the shrill line of a teacher's whistle slicing through their sick fascination with the thing. Of course Harry was now nearly fifteen and much wiser in the ways of the world; still, he shifted his body backwards, feeling the cold curvature of the toilet smack him between the shoulder blades.

After cleaning the toilet and sink, Harry grabbed Vernon's toothbrush and pointed it at the mirror, then the window, muttering the spells under his breath that would have effortlessly shattered both. He pretended to set fire to the lacy skirted doll cloaking the extra roll of toilet paper.

" _Incendio..."_

His breath was sweet from Lucozade. It was almost like pumpkin juice, except for the sharp cut of carbonation.

He napped in the afternoon, beautiful dreamless sleep that came in short waves. Fifteen minutes unconscious, then twenty minutes lying on his side listening to the fan buzz in Dudley's bedroom, and then another twenty-five minutes of oblivion. Napping in the Dursley home was always anxiety-inducing for Harry, because if Petunia or Vernon discovered that he had nothing to do, they would almost certainly give him additional chores. But Harry relaxed in peace, because Petunia had gone out to swim at the country club aquatic centre, and Vernon was at work.

Late afternoon. He woke to Hedwig's frustrated squawks; she was out of her cage, flying from the air vent to the window, seeking relief from the heat.

"Hush," said Harry. "You're s'posed to be asleep during the day."

She looked at him reproachfully. Her amber eyes glinted gold in the slanted sunlight.

"Not until dark," he said. "You know I can't let you out now."

He felt too guilty about Hedwig, so Harry left his room and padded softly downstairs. He was struck with jamais vu when he stepped into the empty front hall. Without any Dursleys in it, the room seemed strange and unfamiliar. Though he knew its constituent pieces—the gold-rimmed clock, the oil painting of baby Dudley, the shoe rack, the two black umbrellas hanging from neat hooks—he could not recognize some fundamental aspect of it without the Petunia's glare, or Dudley's swaggering bluster.

"I'm going out," said Harry, to one.

_So what_? no one replied.

The suburbs were bright, sun-bleached. Garage doors fixed in various states between open and closed to allow tricycles and illicit hoses and small children to dash in and out; buzzing power lines; playgrounds too hot to be played with; an ice cream van trailing teenagers and nannies; then the suburban lots shrank and clustered into terraced houses. He was close to the shops. Harry had no money with him, but he could go to a corner shop and look at the headlines; he could stare at the empty cloudless sky; he could watch the televisions through shop windows. A bus pulled up by Harry and stopped at a red light, grunting and heaving with exhaust. An old Asian woman pushed a trolley full of re-usable grocery bags. Here stood the junction between brown lawned-suburbs and brown brick shops. 

Harry crossed the street and took shelter below the awning of a newspaper stand opposite a phone booth. Inside, a haggard looking mother clutched her toddler's hand. The toddler was pulling open the booth door, trying to escape. A dirty smudge marked his cheek.

"—don't bother me about it again, Len, I really can't bear it—" said the mother, the receiver cradled between her ear and neck.

Harry wandered up to the newsstand and scanned the headlines. The manager of Southampton FC had been replaced by David Merrington... ads for lawn furniture... more stuff about the royal divorce...

"It's not just leaving the patio door open, it's that you don't even _care_ that _I_ care that the cat's gone missing—"

Her toddler smiled up at Harry, exposing candy-stained teeth. Harry tried to smile, but he couldn't help noticing the bold headline splashed across an Irish newspaper.

_EXPLOSION ROCKS WEDDING IN ENNISKILLEN, INJURES 17_

His heart pounded. Beads of sweat bloomed across his forehead as he approached the headline. He stared at the photograph of a quaint country street. Soldiers patrolled in the foreground; behind them, a stucco building had collapsed, rafters and posts scattered like pick-up sticks. He was too excited to fully read the opening paragraph; he could only scan for words like "mysterious," "unexplained" or "spontaneous."

"—no, I _can't_ do this again." The phone booth woman was half-sobbing. She yanked the toddler back into the booth, and spat onto one hand, using her wet fingers to clean a dirty mark off the child's cheek. "You've broken my heart too many times, Len."

_"Nothing would surprise me, but we are at the early stages of the investigation at the moment," said Detective Superintendent Brian Vicker. He declined to comment on the likelihood that Republican Sinn Fein's military units were involved in a possible terrorist plot_

"And Todd's. He misses you. He's asking about you—"

_However, the spokesman for the Ulster Unionist Party said he was confident that investigators would find a link between..._

Harry was generally aware of the ongoing conflict in Northern Ireland. They did learn a little bit about it in Year Four and Five at primary school. Dudley had completed his public speaking assignment with a great deal of help from Uncle Vernon, delivering an anti-Republican rant that struck even their teacher, Ms. Thakur, as absurdly political for a ten-year-old.

"I'm hanging up now. I really am."

"Mummmyyy," whined the toddler. He pulled at his mother's shirt, and she wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.

"I have to go. Todd's fussing—"

"OI!" The newspaper vendor barked at Harry. His fat black mustache hung like grubby shingles over his lip. "You want to read, you have to pay."

"I wasn't touching it," grumbled Harry.

"Are you buying or not?"

Harry shook his head, miserable.

"Then move along." The vendor shook his head. He smelled like spicy sausages. "Effing kids..."

Harry ambled down the pavement, experimenting with shifting his weight far forward before putting down his foot, playing with the moment where he might just fall on his face. He tried to pinpoint the exact instant when it was easier to move on then to fall back. But the more Harry tried to find some middle ground, a millisecond of total balance, the less sense the whole enterprise made. Walking was just walking. There was no magic to it.

A breeze tickled his face, lifted his sweaty hair. Girls in halter tops and flared jeans clustered outside the chemist's; a shirtless old man jogged by, his fuzzy chest gleaming red from sunburn; teen boys smoked a joint beneath the awning of the record shop. The street strummed, growled, chirped, chanted; from the tinny treble of leaking headphones to the dull percussion of slamming doors and rumbling engines. The door to the record shop was open, and Harry cocked his head to hear the wireless.

"You're listening to Kane 103.7. That was "Castles in the Sand" by Thunder. Coming up next, you know this song, you love it, and you've certainly been asking for it..."

Harry crossed his fingers, hoping for anything except—

_"What's with these homies dissing my girl? Why do they gotta front? What did we ever do to these guys..."_

Harry rolled his eyes and kicked a pebble across the pavement. A boy in a backwards baseball cap looked from the pebble to Harry, and raised a single eyebrow.

"Sorry," Harry stared at the ground. "I hate this song..." He stepped into the street to make his way around the cluster of teenagers, surprised to find himself not significantly shorter than them. They were maybe sixteen or seventeen years old. _But I'm almost fifteen_ he thought, with a shiver of delight at the realization that in only two years, he would be allowed to perform magic year-round. _Accio_ to locate his scattered socks in the morning; _Focillo_ to heat up his turkey sandwiches at lunch; and _Wingardium Leviosa_ in the evening, just for the sake of it. That thought sustained him through the chorus of "Buddy Holly," which a grocery store clerk whistled along to as he stacked grapefruits on a display outside his shop.

Faint mists of clouds began to form, only to burn away in the heat. Hot air rose from grates, puffed aggressively from air conditioning units, radiated from the road's asphalt. It hadn't been hot that evening in the graveyard, hadn't it? No, it had been a beautiful night... the sunset was deep pink, and songbirds were murmuring to each other, and the cup was cool beneath Harry's fingertips—

_It doesn't matter. I'm not thinking about that._

He paused before the public library. It was in a two-storey red brick building, a converted house attached to a tanning salon and the local RSPCA. Perhaps Harry could find magazines there, look up even more news... maybe even use the computer, if someone could show him how. He pulled on the handle of the front door, only to find it locked.

An elderly woman came to the window and mouthed "We're closed." She jabbed her finger towards a sign mounted next to the door, featuring the library's extremely limited hours. It was past three already.

Harry sighed and slumped against the door, feeling its warmth on his back. What was the point of a library that was closed twenty-one hours a day? He ran his fingers through his hair, sweeping his damp fringe off his forehead. The soft breeze taunted him, too gentle and slow to dry his sweat.

"That's a neat scar," said a female voice. "How'd you get it?"

He reflexively flattened his fringe back down. "Accident," he muttered.

"It's a cool shape," said the girl. She smelled like lemons and cotton candy, the chemical aroma of body wash or perfume.

He looked up at her. She stood on the pavement, holding a bicycle upright by the handles. A dog's lead was in the front basket. Harry glanced from the dog lead to her blond cornrows, and tanned face; with a nauseating jolt, he realized she was the girl who'd seen him in his underpants. But she was surveying him with a cool interest; there was no cruel smile, no flicker of recognition in her cornflower-blue eyes. Just the radiant spotlight of her attention.

_Please, please let her be an amnesiac_... thought Harry.

"I haven't see you at school," she said. "You don't go to Stonewall, do you?"

He shook his head.

"Nah, I didn't think so." She ran her fingers between her silky braids. "I know everyone. And I haven't seen you." 

"I...don't live here. Most of the time," Harry stammered.

"Boarding school?"

"Yeah."

She laughed, and clapped a hand over her mouth. Her acrylic fingernails were long, painted with tiny butterflies.

"What's funny?" asked Harry, somewhat more sharply than he intended.

"You just...I dunno," she smiled. "You don't look posh. Or sound it." 

Harry shrugged, not knowing how to reply to that. _Of course I don't look posh,_ Harry thought irritably, _I'm wearing Dudley's hideous castoffs that don't fit._

"D'you have a light?" she asked, patting the bulging pocket of her short overalls. 

"I—er—no." Of course he had his wand on him, but there was no way to use it.

She dropped a four-letter word like it was a benediction. Harry opened his mouth to apologize, only to find no sound coming out.

"Anyways..." said the girl. "You weren't looking to go in there, were you?" She gestured to the library.

"No," said Harry, nodding at the same time. He instantly realized how stupid and contradictory his body language was, and felt a tsunami-size cringe roll through him. 

"They're always closed. Just so you know." The girl flicked an invisible particle of dust off her overalls. One strap was unbuttoned, dropping down past her midriff, pointing to an impossibly toned thigh.

"Yeah, um... not... they're closed," Harry choked.

"Right." She swung one leg over her bicycle, straddling the seat. "See you around."

"Yeah."

The girl nodded towards him, and pedaled off, leaving the lemony fragrance in her wake. Harry sniffed at the air once. His eyes were burning. Wiping them dry with two balled-up fists, he stepped away from the library. The heat of the door had left two large patches of sweat on his t-shirt.

He would remember the rest of that afternoon in patches, swelling with sensory detail and then shrinking into a blur. Shoelaces dragging against the cement on Wisteria Walk. The way overlapping leaves projected shadow-puppet theatre onto the paving stones. His wand hidden in the waistband of his shorts, poking at his belly, aggravating the cigarette burn wound. Then, there was Mrs. Figg's house. Her garden shears flashing like a paparazzo's camera in the sun.

"Hello, dear."

"Hi, Mrs. Figg."

"Come here for a moment," she said, dropping the shears. Mrs. Figg stood up slowly, clutching her knees as they extended. "Give me a moment, love. I'm not as young as I used to be."

Her sun hat was big, and it flopped about her face like a fish out of water as she approached him. She reached forward, as if to touch his chin. He stepped back abruptly. Her face flickered through several expressions before landing on careful sympathy.

"How is your summer going?"

"Fine. Good." Harry remembered his manners at once. "How is your summer?"

"Oh, you must know," she said.

Harry didn't know.

"This and that," said Mrs. Figg. "For an old green thumb like me, it's hard, with the drought." She nodded toward her wilting begonias. Dead snails spotted the lawn. Browning cabbages huddled helplessly below a tomato trellis.

"Right. Yeah."

She took a deep breath and squinted at him. There was a smear of whitish sunscreen on her pink nose. He noticed, for the first time, that she wore contact lenses. Something about that didn't fit the picture of Mrs. Figg he held in his mind. She seemed to shift before him, like a lenticular image.

"I hope you're well, Harry."

"Why wouldn't I be?" he said, a bit too forcefully.

Mrs. Figg coughed. "No reason. Forgive me. You've grown so much since I last saw you. You're taller than me now."

"Oh...yeah, I guess." Harry had been taller than Mrs. Figg since he was twelve, so he didn't really know why she was pointing that out now.

"Harry, I—" She swallowed. Her pale throat was flabby, drooping below her chin. "Will you do a favour for an old woman?"

He nodded. There was nothing else to do.

"I have some bags of flour and cat food in the boot of my car. They're too heavy for me to carry in. Could you—"

"Yeah. No problem," said Harry.

"Let me go in and get my keys." Mrs. Figg wiped a droplet of sweat from her forehead. The straw hat's brim freckled her hand with dots of sun and shade. "Come in. I can get you a glass of lemonade."

He followed her through the front door and down a hallway crowded with family photos. Here was a black-and-white picture of a couple on their wedding day, the bride's hair sprinkled with rice; there was a professional photograph of three cats curled up in a basket. On Mrs. Figg's credenza were a series of photos of the late Mr. Figg, showing off some sort of diploma or certificate in front of pointy arching windows that reminded Harry of Hogwarts. Beside these pictures sat a little framed Polaroid of a baby with very dark hair. _Untidy_ dark hair. Harry leaned in closer. It was a newborn who resembled all other newborns; blotchy and squashed-looking, with closed eyes and a blurry adult hand cupping its head. A spider of déja vu tiptoed up Harry's back. He felt like he knew that baby. He felt like he—

"Here you go," said Mrs. Figg. She handed him a mug painted with kittens and balls of yarn.

Harry sipped his lemonade while Mrs. Figg stood expectantly in the hall. Her air conditioning was smooth and soothing. He swallowed his last sip and handed the mug back to her.

"Thanks, Mrs. Figg."

"Not at all. You're doing me a favour, after all."

"Yeah, but..." Harry shrugged. "It's no problem."

Mrs. Figg returned the mug to her kitchen and unlocked the car. It took Harry three trips to carry in the heavy paper bags of flour and economy-sized boxes of cat food. He stepped over two kittens play-wrestling in the hallway on his way to her pantry. They mewed at him as he settled stacks of tinned salmon onto her counter.

"Tibbles had kittens in the spring," said Mrs. Figg. "Lemon Drop, Gumdrop, and Pebbles still haven't found new homes yet. I've placed ads in the paper, but there were six kitties in the litter, and now I've only managed to give away three. My grandniece has been saying I should try putting a notice on this World Wide Web. I don't know about that. I don't think the kind of people I want for my kittens would be on the computer." She smiled at Harry, her eyes crinkling. "But I'm just an old lady. What do you think?"

"I don't know. I don't really...I don't use the computer that much," said Harry.

"Right. Of course not." Mrs. Figg shook her head, as though she had forgotten something important. "Give me one minute dear, I'm going to get to get you something."

She retreated into the laundry room and returned with a quilted cotton purse. Mrs. Figg unbuckled the clasp and removed her wallet.

"Oh, you don't have to—" began Harry automatically.

"No, no. You've been such a help." 

"It's alright, really."

"No," said Mrs. Figg. "You go buy yourself something nice. Maybe a an ice lolly on a day like this, yes?"

He hesitated. Of course, Mrs. Figg didn't know that he was rich, that he had a vault full of gold (though it was totally inaccessible to him at the moment.) She probably looked at him and saw what the nurse, or the girl with the cornrows saw: a t-shirt with holes along the shoulder seams, baggy cargo shorts, and dirty trainers about to split open from the pressure of his toes.

"Thank you," said Harry. "It's very nice of you."

She pressed a crisp ten-pound note into his open hand. He tucked the note into his pocket, and then, just as he was turning around to head for the door, Mrs. Figg called out, "Wait."

He stopped.

"Harry," Mrs. Figg said. She pulled off her sunhat, suddenly on edge. Her grey hair was lank and heavy with sweat. Strands peeled off her forehead and jutted into the air at odd angles.

"Yeah?" he said slowly.

"Be careful. Look out for yourself."

A shiver ran through Harry. It reached through his spine, down his arms, and straight into his tingling fingertips. "Wh...why's that?"

"It's just that—your age. Fifteen now, I think. I'm sorry," she shook her head. "I know I don't make sense. But be careful. People...people your age do silly things. There are dangers. Just watch out. That's all I'm saying." She came to the door, ushered him out onto the front stoop. He was nearly blinded by the bright sunlight, after standing in the dark hall. "Thank you for everything today. For _everything_ ," she repeated.

"Are you alright, Mrs. Figg?" said Harry.

"Yes. Fine. I must feed the cats now," she said. "Thank you, Harry. Take care. Say hello to your aunt for me."

"Right."

"Goodbye, now." She closed the door in his face.

Harry stood on the stoop for a long time or maybe it was a short time, but it felt very long to him. _You could boil an egg in my mind_ , thought Harry. Waters roiling with confusion and heat, heat, heat. 

The baby picture on the dresser. Butterflies on fingernails. A missing cat. Petunia's blonde hair shining blue in the fridge-light. And Enniskillen, which had nothing to do with Voldemort except if it did... Ron and Hermione nowhere near, sharing nothing but pleasantries in the post, unable to help him separate the mysterious from the mundane. How he missed their amiable bickering, their whispers in his ear! How ached to roll over in his four-poster and see Ron in the next bed, his ghostly feet sticking out from under the blanket! Harry's scar throbbed in time to the longing that crested and fell in him, oceanic. In his chest, a miserable cavity opened. He thought of an old song that went _, "Though the holes were rather small, they had to count them all..."_

He stared blankly down the street, caught sight of the signpost pointing out the intersection of Privet Drive and Wisteria Walk. Harry nearly tripped down the flagstones of Mrs. Figg' drive. The dehydrated cabbages watched him stumble to the pavement. Fire hydrants measured his steps, and he was almost at his house, but no closer to home.


	8. dreams

**_in my mind, my dreams are real_ **

**_now you're concerned about the way i feel_ **

**"Rock 'n' Roll Star," Oasis**

Harry heard the clicking and knew she was gone. Her talons against the windowsill were his nightly lullaby, so he rolled from his stomach onto his side, careful to rest on the shoulder opposite his knife wound. He tucked his knees up to his chest. Harry had slept in that position for as long as he could remember. It would be years and years before Ginny would wipe her eyes and pull her sleep-tousled hair back from her face, and say, in that gentle way of hers, "I don't mean to go all soul-stirrer on you, but d'you think there might be something to the way you always curl up in the fetal position?" And he would say, "The fetal _what?_ "

But it was 1995 and the night was humid as a dog's breath and Harry's body was getting heavier, even as his mind became lighter. Then the darkness of his eyelids became blacker than black, the dark of total oblivion. Sleep rocked him back and forth, back and forth, until he realized with a start that he was on a train. The engine vibrated beneath him. He opened his eyes. Windows formed an endless path of rectangles diminishing into their own vanishing point. There were no compartments and no doors. And Ron was there, and Hermione was too, and a man with a pronounced limp was approaching him, brandishing a ticket. Harry knew he was going to Hogwarts, because that was where all trains lead, wasn't it?

The ticket was pink. Remus Lupin said, "Of course, you'll need a permission slip."

"I don't have one," said Harry, who, without checking, just _knew_ he didn't have one.

"I have mine!" said Hermione, excitedly producing hers.

"Mine's...I don't know, I can't find it," said Ron. "But I have it somewhere." He leaned down to riffle through a rucksack, pulling out random objects; a Sneakoscope, a candy bar, a tiny dragon breathing real flames, and a map that somehow was also a clock.

"I can't let you go on the field trip without one, Harry. You'll have to get this signed by Professor McGonagall."

"She won't sign it, she's not my guardian" said Harry, miserably. He was going to miss the trip. And he wanted to go so badly...

"I'll go with you to ask," Hermione said.

Harry turned to look at her, but her face was indistinct. It's not that she was blurry, but he found that he could not bring his eyes into focus when he looked at her directly.

"That's a good idea," said Professor Lupin.

"You'll help me ask?" Harry implored her. "Convince her?"

"Yeah..." Hermione said. "We've helped each other out, haven't we? We both got here."

They reached for the ticket simultaneously, then shrank back, out of courtesy.

"Let's just take it together," said Hermione, but she spoke in Harry's own voice. They both reached for the pink ticket again, but Harry touched it a split second sooner, and suddenly, the train was gone. The thrumming of the engine beneath him had gone silent and still.

It was dusk. Harry walked around experimentally, feeling nearly weightless. He ran and jumped effortlessly. Around him, crooked gravestones chopped up the landscape; in the distance, a Victorian clapboard house was silhouetted against the bloody sunset. Harry noticed two people walking towards him. The first figure had a jaunty, athletic walk. The second figure was shorter; she walked gracefully, her long hair waving flag-like in the breeze.

"Hey! Harry! Harry, come here and meet my friend," called out the young man.

"Hey, Cedric," said Harry.

"Here she is," Cedric grinned. "The newest TriWizard champion. This is—"

But a gust of wind whistling through the gravestones covered up the young woman's name, and Harry did not want to be rude and ask again.

She reached Cedric's side and smiled at Harry. Her long hair was red and lustrous, her cheeks lightly freckled. In her platform espadrilles, she stood at least half a head taller than him.

"I'm so pleased to meet you," said the Laura Ashley model, adjusting the shawl around her shoulders. "I can't believe you won the Tournament so young."

"Harry's brilliant," Cedric insisted. "Tell her how you won, Harry."

"I...I was on a dragon," said Harry. "And there was an egg. Then the egg opened and inside it was a weed—" But now that he thought of it, he couldn't remember how he had won the Tournament...or if he had won. Wasn't there another task, or something? He searched his memory, turning up only flashing Sneakoscopes and the clicking of Hermione's knitting needles.

"Come with me," said the beautiful young woman. "I want to show you something." She offered Harry her hand. It was so very soft. She led him away from Cedric, who waved, his spirits never lagging as she and Harry abandoned him in the darkening graveyard.

The world blurred and refocused. Harry was following the young woman up a set of dark, creaky stairs. He braced himself with a hand on the wall beside him, feeling flocked velvet wallpaper. Dark patches on the faded paper showed where pictures had been removed.

"Just in here," said the woman. "I know you'll like this..."

He followed her eagerly around the gentle curve of the staircase. They emerged into a short hall, and she disappeared through a doorway, Harry trailing her.

They were in a grand, but dilapidated bedroom lit by a flickering candelabra. A walnut dresser was snowy with dust; brown paper was taped over the soaring windows. To Harry's right, velvet drapes shrouded a four-poster bed. They were billowing and rustling, as though an imperceptible breeze filtered through them. The drapes beckoned to him, their gentle motions hypnotic. Harry stepped towards the bed. His hand moved of its own accord toward the velvet.

"No," said the woman. "Don't open them. Come here."

She was leaning over the dark dresser, examining her reflection in a liver-spotted mirror. Harry approached her. He was fully gliding now, hardly feeling his legs at all. She turned towards him, letting the shawl slip off her shoulders and fall to the floor. Her lips were partially open. Doe eyes reflected seven shimmering candle flames. He tried to smile at her, but felt too uncoordinated to move both sides of his mouth at once.

"Do you want to see underneath this?" said the woman, lifting up the hem of her blouse. "No one will know."

_Yes, yes, yes_ , thought Harry, but he said, "Cannot predict now."

"What's that?"

_Yes, I do_ , he tried to say, but all that came out was "Better not tell you now."

"Don't you like me, though?" she said.

"Ask again later!" Harry blurted, panicked because he could not speak the simple word so clear in mind.

The woman sighed heavily, looking hurt. He thought she would leave him, run down the stairs, run off to—where were they again? But instead, she grabbed her blouse, pulled it up and over her head and dropped it. Harry had barely a chance to admire the creamy skin and freckled clavicle before his stomach fell through his body, for as the blouse peeled off, so did the woman's beautiful, uncomplicated face.

And underneath it was a face Harry had memorized and retraced in reverence, like the four points of a crucifix. Forehead, left cheek, right cheek, and chin. Sad emerald eyes. His mother.

Her face crumpled in recognition of his own, and a searing pain burst through his scar, forcing Harry to clutch his head in agony. The world shattered. The spotted mirror splintered to bits and disappeared. Lily's melancholy eyes were the last thing to fade away.

His woke to his own wail of pain. Harry rolled over and swallowed back a mouthful of vomit. Stomach acid stung his lips. His gums felt raw, as though he were a baby cutting teeth.

The digital clock read 1:40. He rocked back and forth on his side, closing his eyes and pressing the heels of his hands hard against his eyes, willing the pain away. It felt like a long time before the agony dissolved into a manageable migraine. Harry uncovered his eyes and looked at Hedwig's empty cage, blurry and moonlit across the bedroom. He blinked. The blurriness wavered and wobbled and streaked down his cheeks like twin train tracks. He touched his cheek with one finger; licking his fingertip, he tasted salt.

 _Train tracks._ He tried to recall the dream; only bits and pieces returned to him. Something about a train, and Lupin was there. No, it wasn't Lupin, it was Hermione. And there was a velvet curtain. He had been in a long hallway with a black door at the end—no, it was a staircase, and there were three doors...but he was certain there was a blue-purple-red gradient, a fiery dusk, a beautiful, ominous twilight. And there he was walking, but sort of floating, and there was a hill...but how did the train connect to the hill? Because there were _shapes_ on the hill, yes, rectangular shapes, grey and stony and marble. And a young man and a—

"I'm not thinking about that," Harry whispered aloud. He looked to the clock and wished that Hedwig would return at once, as though the glowing numbers were birthday candles. And he thought, _there was something about candles, wasn't there? Seven candles._ But he could not cling to the thin film of the dream without seeing the parts he did not want to remember. So he lay his head back against the sweaty pillow and pushed down the blanket, trying to cool off. It was only when the headlights of a car passed through the window blinds that Harry noticed the dark patch below his waist. His boxers were damp below his hesitant fingers.

The well-practiced routine, the old rhythm from primary school. He could almost be seven years old and living in the cupboard beneath the stairs. Harry changed clothes in the dark, shutting dresser drawers with his flexed toes. With his sheets and soiled boxers bundled up in his arms, he felt like a hobo from an American film he'd seen about the Great Depression. He tiptoed downstairs. Vernon's loud snores could tear through crumpled paper. In the dark laundry room, the tiles were cold and soothing to his bare feet. Harry threw his bundle into the apron sink and poured liquid laundry soap onto the fabric, scrubbing it through the sheets and boxers with his bare hands. He wondered what Dobby would think if he saw him right then. Would he insist on helping, or would he vanish with embarrassment at Harry's predicament?

Probably the former, thought Harry, glad that Dobby was safely stashed away in Hogwarts. He almost smiled.

Harry wrung out the sheets and boxers as well as he could, cringing when droplets of water hit the bottom of the sink with a metallic clink. He glanced at the dryer, but could not chance it. Petunia would definitely notice if he threw anything inside before Laundry Day. She noticed everything. The other day, she'd asked Harry why he'd been snacking on grapes—two grapes, to be specific—an hour before dinner. He had no choice but to bring the soggy wet bundle back upstairs and hide it in his room, where it would dry into crisp wrinkles.

Back in his room, he stuffed the wet sheets and boxers into the lowest dresser drawer, the one that stayed empty year-round because Harry left his winter clothes in his trunk. He shoved it closed with his foot and fell back onto his bare mattress. The ceiling was dark and bubbly with optical noise. It was impossible to fall asleep with the rough mattress beneath his bare arms and legs. He got off the bed and decided to rest atop the blanket, since it was so warm, but that didn't help either. Harry laid on his stomach; he tried lying on his back with his arms thrown up above his head, but he felt so exposed he couldn't possibly relax. Finally, Harry gave in to the impulse to roll up into a ball, knees tucked into chest. Through his blinds, the sodium streetlamp glowed on, like a sentinel.

Sleep eluded him. The pain in his scar wasn't unbearable, but it kept him awake and uncomfortable. The numbers on the digital clock changed much too slowly. He heard the stop-and-go dribbling of urine into a toilet bowl, a flush, and a faucet's rush. That tiny suburban waterfall. That would be Vernon, up in the middle of the night. From somewhere down the street, the faintest sound of a dog barking made Harry scrunch up his eyes, thinking of Sirius. The weight of a dog's head on his lap as he lay in the Hospital Wing, safe in enchanted slumber.

He rested, his eyes half-open. The ceiling slowly changed colours, as night faded into dawn like a potion maturing into full potency. Harry perked up when he heard a scratching sound from the window. It was Hedwig, hooting in irritation at the window coverings. The blinds lifted, bending awkwardly as she attempted to sneak her way underneath them. When she flew to her open cage, a feather fell to the bedroom floor. She sipped eagerly from her water bowl.

Harry pushed himself up by the elbows, then rolled off his bed to join her. Her crowning feathers were soft beneath his fingertips. Hedwig fluffed out her body and trilled a musical greeting.

"What's that you have?" he breathed. Two little rectangles had fallen to the newspaper shreds lining her cage. Harry picked up the envelopes and tore them both open, turning on his desk lamp. 

The first was a letter from Ron, written in his hasty half-script, lacking any commas whatsoever.

_Hey Harry_

_Still hanging out here with Hermione and the family. I wish I could tell you a bit more of things but you know we're not supposed to share too much in a letter. It's kind of dull without you but—_

Harry scanned through the letter, impatient for real news. Absolutely nothing. Just a few jokes about getting fat on his mum's cooking, complaints about the twins, more promises to "talk later" and an update on professional Quidditch scores. He didn't even bother to finish reading it before dropping Ron's letter to the floor and turning to the second one.

_July 7th, 1995_

_Dear Harry,_

_I really do wish you could be here with Ron and I. We're so anxious to see you again—_

He rolled his eyes. It was so like Hermione, to write the date on the stupid letter. He scanned on.

_—and the worst part is, they don't know any Muggle bands whatsoever! Can you believe it? The state of wizarding-Muggle relations cannot possibly improve when wizards are so lacking in basic understanding of Muggle culture, and that includes the arts! I explained to Ron how important it was that wizards really get a full picture of Muggles and stop seeing them as these simple brutes tragically lacking in powers, when actually, scientifically and socially, they have advanced so far past what wizards have been able to achieve. When I recommended_ Under the Pink _and_ Dry _, two of my favourite albums of late, nobody had even—_

Harry rolled his eyes. _Oh my god,_ he thought, _who cares?_ Harry had never even heard of those albums either. His eyes glazed over at Hermione's tightly crammed printing, her complaints about the _Daily Prophet_ and the Hogwarts board of directors, her jibes at Ron and an explanation of exactly how she'd written to Professor McGonagall to request permission to audit NEWT classes during their upcoming OWL year. Then he noticed the upper-case letter C and two inkblots, signs of Hermione's hesitant hand. 

_I know you are probably wondering if Cedric has been buried yet, and if there was a funeral. I asked Mr. Weasley, and he said that they haven't heard anything at the Ministry. It might be private, but I don't know. I do hope you're holding up, and not feeling too awfully about things. It must be a terrible summer you're having._

Harry dropped her letter on the desk. It was pointless. They weren't going to say anything of value. At this very moment, they were asleep in cozy rooms at the Burrow. Today, they'd probably ride brooms in the orchard, Ron racing above the apple trees, Hermione timidly floating four feet off the ground. Mrs. Weasley would yell at Ginny to set the table. Fred and George would cook up something subversive and hilarious up in their bedroom, with the window open to let in the fresh country breeze. He could see Hermione's homework parchment scattered across Ron's bedroom floor. And Ron would tease her for studying so hard over the holidays while Crookshanks pawed at her frizzy hair.

In Ottery St. Catchpole, no one cared about the drought; they had magic. Water. High noon turning the grassy meadows to emeralds. He could taste ripe cherries by the handful, smell the chicken feed Ginny sprinkled across the muddy coop. Harry knelt down to pick up Ron's letter from the floor and compared it to Hermione's. Both letters were written in the same violet spell-checking ink Harry recognized from Ron's school trunk. A dark river rushed through Harry's abdomen.

He crumpled both letters up and threw them across the room. Then Harry crawled on his hands and knees to the dark cavity beneath his bed, and he retrieved the Laura Ashley catalogue. Glossy pages and frozen smiles, all crescent-shaped like nail clippings. He turned to the redhead in her espadrilles. She was beaming at Harry; she wanted him, still. He did not want her anymore.

So he turned the page. It was a suntanned brunette who fixed Harry in her absent gaze as, for the first time, he probed his own skin not for wounds, but for the evidence of something tender and responsive. His metronomic breathing marking the space between frantic ruptures. Hedwig closed her eyes. Even the rising sun waited, unsure.

And then all at once, he was closed. The ruptures disappeared into flatness; dawn broke like a pebble crashing through a window. Harry dropped the catalogue to the floor. It was over. He was on the other side; something in Harry knew that he could no more return to the darkness and the digital clock than he could to the ripe leaves and evening breeze of the hedge maze. There are borders you can't go through. There are seams.

So Harry rose and dressed for the morning, pairing socks as he wondered why he felt so unreasonably bitter that Ron and Hermione were sharing an inkwell.


	9. swear

**_and if you live through this with me_ **

**_i swear that i would die for you_ **

**Hole, "Asking For It"**

"You can have the rest of the rice, since apparently no one likes it," muttered Petunia, scraping the congealed yellow mass onto Harry's plate. 

"Gee, thanks," Harry said bitterly. It wasn't actually bad—in fact, it was quite flavourful and unlike anything Petunia had cooked before—but on principle, he had to be ungrateful. Harry shovelled rice into his mouth, watching the emerging brouhaha with more than a little amusement. 

"Might as well stick a dot to your forehead, mum," said Dudley. "Are you gonna be in one of those films, those—what 'dyou call them again—" 

"Bollywood," chuckled Uncle Vernon. "With those tacky outfits and the women all showing their tummies".

"I thought I'd try a different recipe for a change," she said. "Since Dudley is so bored of lean ground beef, and both of you have complained about getting tomato salad so often."

"I'm sure there's a few things in between meatloaf and curry vindaloo," grinned Vernon. A grain of basmati rice was stuck between his front teeth. "Pass the Coke, Harry."

He pushed the 2-litre bottle toward Vernon without picking it up.

"It's chicken biryani," said Petunia.

"What are these red things s'posed to be?" Dudley complained. He poked at his uneaten rice with a fork. 

"Saffron, not that it matters. I won't make it again." Petunia got up and retrieved a plastic container from a drawer in the cupboard; she returned to collect Vernon and Dudley's rice and chicken. The sauce left yellow streaks on the platter like a child's drawing of lightning. The low evening sunlight glinted off her wedding ring.

"There's a Indian at my firm," said Vernon. "IT Department. He's got that accent, I can hardly understand a word he says. In my view—and I said this to Gary, I said—you can't hire a man who is incapable of communicating with customers."

Harry gritted his teeth. "But if he works in IT, he wouldn't need to speak to customers, would he."

"If you knew anything about business, boy, you'd know that your customers are the only thing that matters. No customers—" at this, Vernon made a slashing gesture with his hands—"no business. No business, no money. No money, no house that you sleep in so ungratefully."

Petunia slammed the refrigerator door, and Dudley looked up from the Gameboy he'd been fiddling with under the table.

"I'll heat up some ham from Saturday," she said.

"Nothing in this house but leftovers and Paki food," mumbled Dudley, jabbing at a button.

"I'm running to the shops tomorrow." Petunia dumped a Tupperware container onto a plate and shoved it into the microwave. The buttons beeped like a toy robot Harry had seen in a commercial a few years prior. Even though he'd already been too old for toys, the bitter longing still rose in him when he watched the boys in the commercial throw a ball through a hoop in the robot's hand.

"Make me a baked potato as well, dear," Vernon called out. "My stomach's grumbling something awful."

Harry poured himself some Coke. They never served Muggle soft drinks at Hogwarts. When he sipped it, the taste bubbled and rippled through him, sweet cinnamon, melted caramel, and something dark and lovely. He used to get a soft drink once a week, and only if he completed all his chores to Petunia's satisfaction. The hiss of escaping gases when the cap was unscrewed made him salivate. But as Harry sipped at his drink, he noticed the Coke didn't taste right. It was still sweet, still cinnamon-tinged, yet something in it did not match his expectations.

Plates clinked against the table as Petunia placed the reheated ham down before Vernon and Dudley, using somewhat more force than necessary.

"And ketchup," said Vernon. Petunia started to rise, but he pushed her back down by the shoulder. "Harry can get it. He's done nothing all day, after all."

_And what has Dudley done_ , _other than filch cigarettes from the chemist's?_ thought Harry, but like the robot with the hoop in its hand, he rose and did as he was told.

"So Peggy down on Thistle Trace told me Brendan might be shipped out next month," Petunia said.

"Shipped where?" grunted Vernon.

"It's not certain yet. But people are saying we might get involved in the Balkans."

Harry looked up, curious. He generally had no interest in neighbourhood gossip, but a war was different.

"Who's Brendan?" he said.

"You don't know him," said Petunia, at the same time as Vernon barked, "Not your business, boy."

"And the whole thing's ridiculous," added Vernon. "Not our circus, not our monkeys, I say. Why should fine young British men get slaughtered for those people? You think they'd send their kids if the French invaded England? Hmm?"

"It's only what I've heard, Vernon."

Harry filled his mouth with the last bite of chicken biryani. Tinny beeps issued from Dudley's GameBoy.

"If only he'd had the grades for university," Vernon continued. He wiped his mustache with grapevine-patterned napkin. "Then he wouldn't have had to go and join the army. Waste of a life. You hear me, Duds?"

"What..." grunted Dudley in reply.

"I said, if he'd only had the grades for university, he wouldn't have to ship out to die for some idiotic cause out in god knows where. The grades, Dudley, you've got to get them."

"I've got wrestling, Dad." Dudley rolled his eyes. "I could get a scholarship on that alone."

"Dudley, we know you're a wonderful athlete," said Petunia patiently, as if speaking to a toddler. "But Daddy only means that marks can make a difference too."

Dudley pressed several buttons in quick succession, then rested his Gameboy on the tabletop. "Why're you going on about me," he complained, "when Harry's got lousy grades?"

"What would _you_ know about _my_ grades?" Harry growled, fury rising in him. "You don't know the first thing—"

"I never saw a report in the past four, five years," Vernon overturned the ketchup bottle, squeezing a slimy trickle of red onto his reheated ham.

"You never asked."

Petunia sighed. "The military can be good for some people, Dudley. It gives them—it gives them a structure. A routine."

"I suppose someone's got do it." Vernon nodded towards Harry. "Though from what I've heard, those boys aren't what they used to be. No chivalry, no honour, not like there was back during the War. Soldiers these days just want a pay cheque, that's it. They're not doing it for Queen and country."

"That's why the Falklands went down the toilet," muttered Petunia. "A complete fiasco."

Vernon gulped down his soft drink, then belched. "Pardon me," he said, patting his belly. "I remember when all that was on TV. Dudders was still a baby, wasn't he?" 

"He was walking already. He was toddling about everywhere." Petunia said, leaning over to ruffle Dudley's hair. He squirmed away from her hand. A brief expression of hurt appeared and disappeared from her face, like the flash of a camera. "I was in the car when I heard the _Sheffield_ sank. It was all over the radio." She tightened her ponytail, tucking a single stray hair back behind her ear. "I remember trying to listen to the news but Harry was fussing. I had to pull over and give him a bottle. They said twenty people were killed. I don't know why, but I just remember him taking the bottle and his fingers were sticky." 

Harry stared a hole into his place mat. He didn't like this story.

"That's gross, Mum," complained Dudley. "Honestly." 

"He's right, Petunia," Vernon grunted. "I don't know what's gotten into you this week." 

"I don't know what you're talking about," Petunia said in a flat voice She turned to gaze out the window, blankly staring at the thirsty rhododendrons in the garden. 

"You've been off-kilt—" 

"Vernon," she said, her voice sharpening. For once, he went silent. A look passed between them like a squash ball bouncing between walls.

"Anyways." Petunia sipped at a slender glass of water. She was on a diet prohibiting all sweet drinks. "It's true that Harry ought to start thinking about careers. The military is an option."

"He's too scrawny to fit the uniform," Dudley quipped.

Harry clenched the edges of his placemat. The soft vinyl turned slick with his sweat.

Vernon laughed. "I don't know Dudders, these days, they'll take any pipsqueak." 

"I'm _not_ joining the army," said Harry. "So you can forget about that."

"Well, you won't be relying on the Bank of Vernon Dursley for handouts when you're of age, that's for sure." Little threads of ketchup hung from Vernon's mustache like a flapper's fringed skirt.

"No, I _won't_ be," Harry said into his dirty plate. _'Cause I've got plenty of my own money_ , he added mentally. He had been careful not to bring up his fortune around Vernon and Petunia, worried that they'd find some way to try and "reimburse" themselves for sheltering Harry all these years. He wouldn't put it past Vernon to try and get Harry's money locked up in a trust to be administered by himself, as Harry's legal guardian.

"God almighty, I can't wait until you find out what it's like in the real world," spewed Vernon. He looked strangely happy to hear Harry talking back. Harry's silences bothered him more than an easy invitation to a sparring match. "You won't show us that kind of cheek when you're on your own." 

"If I was on my own, I wouldn't show you anything," said Harry. He felt somewhat unchallenged by Vernon's verbal prowess. Professor Snape, as horrid as he was, made a far worthier opponent.

"That's enough of that," snapped Petunia. "Your uncle's been nothing but gracious in putting a roof over your head all these years, with money he works hard for." 

"Too right you are, darling." Vernon wiped his hideous mustache with a paper napkin. 

Though he and Petunia had finished eating, they remained at the table to wait for Dudley and Vernon to finish their leftovers. Dudley seemed disinterested in the food in a way he hadn't been as a child. He ate slowly and without any obvious enjoyment, idly mashing his baked potato around with a fork. Harry remembered Dudley stuffing his face and licking his plate clean at each meal; when had he stopped doing that? Finally, Dudley pushed his plate away and scraped his chair back from the table, an official sign that the meal was over.

"Help me tidy up," said Petunia to Harry. He rose to collect the dishes, scraping globs of Vernon's ketchup onto his own plate. Dudley got up and stalked out to the hallway, leaving his dirty plates behind. 

"I might take the car out for a spin, get some ice cream cones," Vernon remarked. "What say you, Dudley? Hmm? You want a chocolate cone?"

"Nah," Dudley replied, sight unseen. Harry wet a dishrag in the sink and wiped down the tabletop. Grains of yellow rice outlined the absent place mats. "I'm going out with Piers." 

"He can come along, if you like. Ride in the backseat. Maybe I'll give you a spin in the Cavalier, see if you can drive a block or two." 

"Dad, I _said_ I'm going with Piers."

"Are you sure?" Vernon asked. Harry heard a heavy creaking in the floorboards indicating his uncle's shifting weight. "We used to do ice cream runs all the time. Just you, me, and the Cav."

"Yeah, right. The Vauxhall Cava _lier_ ," he enunciated sarcastically. "I think I'll pass."

Vernon said something in reply too quiet for Harry to hear. Harry felt a tap on his shoulder. He looked up. 

"Sweep the floor, too," Petunia muttered.

Harry rolled his eyes, but he headed for the laundry room to retrieve the broom anyway. In the hallway, he glimpsed Vernon and Dudley. Golden sunlight silhouetted Dudley against the front door and its fanlight. His baseball cap was on backwards and at an angle.

"Don't be out late," Vernon muttered.

"Alright, alright." Dudley opened the front door and stepped onto the stoop. Vernon ran towards him, pulling his wallet from his overly tight khaki trousers. Harry slumped into the laundry room, not needing to see this part. He didn't get it. Sure, he had lots of his own dad's money, but it's not like his dad was alive. Would James have given Harry hundreds of Sickles in pocket money, just for a trip out? Wouldn't he have been a bit stricter, had he lived to parent a teenage boy?

Wouldn't he?

The kitchen was nearly spotless, with only a few stray crumbs to sweep up. Petunia turned the transistor radio on to an oldies station, and the music played low while she washed dishes and wiped the countertops. Floating strings rose and fell; a posse of back-up singers cooed beneath a woman's bright soprano. He couldn't quite make out the words over the rush of the faucet. 

Harry saw the recipe for chicken biryani fastened to the refrigerator with a magnet.

"You can pull it down," Petunia said, stiffly. "Toss it. I won't be making it again."

Harry took down the recipe, but he hesitated before the bin. It was a cutout from a magazine. His stomach lurched when he thought of the Laura Ashley catalogue, though of course this must be from _Gourmet Cooking_.

"I thought it was fine," said Harry.

"Nobody else liked it. Except you and me."

"It was good," he repeated. "Like...the spices, and everything."

Petunia leaned back against the pantry, resting her head on door. She closed her eyes and exhaled through her nose, folding bony hands against her stomach. "I probably won't make it again. It's not worth the trouble."

Harry shrugged. "

"But..." Her icy blue eyes snapped open like those of a doll turned upright. "Thank you." 

"Right." Harry picked at the hem of his ratty t-shirt. All at once, he wanted to leave the kitchen quite desperately, as though it was midnight again, and Petunia was framed in the refrigerator light. As though the sweat on his forehead came from the bathtub's faucet.

"You're excused now," she said. "I have to run out. I have an errand."

"Yeah, okay." 

"Alright." Petunia disappeared from the kitchen, treading so lightly he couldn't hear her footsteps on the floorboards. Harry waited in the kitchen, wondering if he ought to turn the radio off. He heard her car beep twice as she unlocked the door, followed by the purring of the engine. _That night on our honeymoon_ , sang the woman, _we stayed in separate rooms._ The music seemed to light up from the inside, glowing, lantern-like. He didn't want to turn it off, but then he felt the knob in his own fingers, and the kitchen fell silent. He realized he was still holding the broom with his other hand.

Harry returned it to the laundry room. He laced up his too-tight tennis shoes with one knee and then another pressed to the cool, tiled floor. Outside, Vernon was hosing down the car for no particular reason. Harry hunched his shoulders and tried to slip past, unnoticed.

"Come back after dark again and you'll regret it!" barked Vernon, splashing Harry's shoes with the hose. 

"Alright, _alright._ " He shrank away from the stream. "You didn't have to spray me."

"Don't block the stream, then!" 

Harry gritted his teeth and huffed away from Number Four, not thinking of where he was going. He wasn't going anywhere. Without Muggle money, there was nowhere to go and nothing to buy. Just the pavement under his shoes, solid and warm from the heat of the day. In his head, the oldies song echoed, upbeat violin strokes bouncing between his aching scar and the back of his skull. Harry stepped carefully over the cracks in the sidewalk. He used to hear a jump-rope rhyme about stepping on a crack and breaking your mother's back and it was stupid, but since then, he just couldn't bring himself to do it.

Ron and Hermione didn't know that about him. Hermione might be perceptive, but in the wizarding world, they walked on cobblestones, not concrete. It made things easier. Harry was certain that he would never tell anyone. This was because the pavement thing was dumb, and it was superstitious, and most of all, because his mother was far beyond protection. _Band of gold..._ Lily lived in a film case of undeveloped Kodachrome, in an oldies song, in the underside of the sofa cushions that didn't fade because they never saw the sun. _All that's left of the dreams I hold..._ She lived in a tarnished halfpenny's raised numerals: 1960. He'd found it in the London Underground, on the day Hagrid first took him to buy his school books. Mind the gap.

Children dragged skipping ropes behind them, heading inside as the sun dipped below the rooftops. Garage doors motored shut. A middle-aged man was walking a large dog on a lead. The dog was panting, probably because its black and brown fur was long and shaggy; its ears perked up at the sound of Harry shuffling forward.

"Evening," nodded the man, as he and Harry met. He had a grey mustache, and a fisherman's hat pulled down over his head; he might have been fifty-five or sixty. 

"Evening." 

"Come along, Scout." He yanked twice on the dog's lead, as she approached Harry's shins, sniffing with great interest. 

"It's alright," said Harry. "I'm not afraid of dogs." Not anymore, at least. And then, with some hesitation: "Can I pet him?"

The man shrugged. "If you like. It's a _her_ , though. She's not a biter, but she's a licker, aren't you baby girl?" The man ruffled Scout's tail affectionately. Scout barked.

"S'okay."

She stepped forward and nuzzled Harry's ankle with her wet nose; her breath felt warm. He gently patted her head, ran his fingers along the slender ridges of her ears. Harry wondered how Padfoot would react to Scout. Maybe they would be best friends; maybe it was okay to have a human best friend, and then a separate dog best friend. '' 

"Is she a German Shepherd?" said Harry.

"Close, but no cigar. She's part Belgian Shepherd, part mutt. Twelve years old and still going strong." 

"Oh."

Scout wagged her tail rapidly as Harry ran his fingers through the long fur of her neck. She licked his shin, and he couldn't stop himself from grinning.

"She's my princess," said the man fondly. "Great pets, they are. I tell anyone, you're down and out, you're having it rough, get you a dog. Get yourself a dog and you'll never be alone. Do you have a dog?"

Harry shrugged. "Sort of." He touched Scout's nose, letting her sniff the chicken biryani residue on his fingers. "I have one, but...I don't get to see him in the summer."

"Aah, I see." He nodded at Harry, looking wistful. "My Scout, she does everything for me. Everything. I get up out of bed for my girl. Ten years ago, my wife served me papers. I heard the doorbell, I open the door, the courier says 'This is it, man. I'm sorry.' He says, 'Sign here, here, and here.' It wasn't a total surprise, but... " He shook his head, gazing out at the blank hedges and dusty MPVs of Privet Drive.

"I hear that doorbell in my dreams. Anyways. That evening, I get in my car, I drive to the shelter. They say, 'We're closing in fifteen minutes. Either choose one or get out.' I walk up and down past the cages. Scout comes out, sticks her tongue through the bars, licks the ink off my hand. The hand I signed with. I took her home that day. She barked non-stop for three days, she pissed on the carpet. I didn't care. I took her to dog school, puppy training, whatever you call it. And we've been best friends ever since, haven't we, princess?"

Scout turned tail, and ran back to her master, jumping up to place her paws on his chest. He laughed and patted her head. 

"Wow." Harry found it hard to respond. "She, er...she's got nice fur."

"Yes, she does." The man pulled a little black plastic bag from the pocket of his shorts. He pulled on the lead, guiding Scout away from Harry. "Well, you have a nice night, young man."

"Yeah. You too." 

They nodded to each other again, the man stepping aside to let Harry pass him as Scout squatted on a dehydrated lawn. He wandered on, past bay windows and two-car garages and half-timbered homes with stucco facades. Cirrocumulus clouds were purple against a deep strawberry sky. Harry wondered if Ron would have thought that man was off his rocker. Ron would probably have made a crack about him, and Harry would laugh along. But in the moment, Harry didn't feel like laughing; the man's monologue felt like tearing open an envelope addressed solely to Harry. 

The streetlights were starting to blink one, one after another. Mindful of Vernon's anger the other day, Harry turned on his heels and headed back to Number Four. The evening heat was dissipating, replaced by a refreshing breeze. The wind tickled Harry's messy fringe.

"Oh, it's you," said Uncle Vernon, when he pulled open the front door.

"Yeah. Fancy that."

"Well, get inside then." Vernon looked disappointed to find that Harry had obeyed the house rules. "Take your shoes off, don't track dirt all over the floors." He glared at Harry, then ambled off into the family room, where the TV was droning on about "Quorn burgers, a tasty alternative to meat."

Harry's toes were rubbed raw from his too-small trainers. The uppers were starting to separate from the soles. He sat on the staircase's bottom step and pulled off his socks so he could rub his feet. Little black hairs were growing from the lower digit of his big toes. It seemed like his nail beds were changing shape, too; they were longer and not so round anymore. When he massaged his sore toes, an image came into his head, unbidden: Pettigrew's bloody stump of a wrist. Severed tendons like uprooted tree roots. _Stop stop stop_ , he chanted internally. _It's over, it's gone_. It's in a graveyard on a hill, not here. Harry's mantra, back in the summer of '95.

He didn't put his socks back on, but carried them upstairs in his hand. They were damp with sweat. On the second floor, he saw Petunia standing in the doorway of the master bedroom, evidently home from her errand. Her hair was separated into sections wrapped in tinfoil, silver butterflies flapping about her head.

"Harry," she said. "Go to your room. I left the clean sheets for you in a folded pile. Don't go leaving wet sheets in a drawer again. They'll get mouldy."

He froze, one hand resting on the top baluster How could she know about the sheets...how would she even know to open that drawer...and did she know he was wetting the bed again, did she know, would she say anything? Would she tell Vernon? Would the earth split open to swallow his embarrassment?

"Did you hear me? said Petunia, more impatiently. "I want those put away, and don't do it again."

"Y—yeah," said Harry, weak.

She stepped back into her room and shut the door. As soon as she was gone, Harry clapped his hands over his face, spread his fingers beneath his glasses to rub the humiliation from his eyes. His skin was hot, burning red. _I'll never get out of here_ , he thought. _This summer will never be over_. He didn't realize his feet had carried him to his own room until he felt the hardwood floor, cool beneath his toes.

"Coo," murmured Hedwig.

Harry took his hands away from his eyes. She had escaped her cage once again, and her talons clicked against his desk. Hedwig nibbled at the letter to Ron he'd abandoned.

"Stop that," he said, but his heart wasn't in it, and Hedwig knew it. She looked from his to his bed, as if to say, _What's that?_

There was the pile of folded sheets, a token of Harry's humiliation. Next to it was a cardboard box with a sporty logo on the front; he rushed to open it, barely daring to hope... 

He used his ragged fingernail to slit open the tape holding the cardboard flap in place. His hands nearly shook as his pulled open the flap and raised the lid. Inside the box, a brand new basketball sat, inflated to perfection. It was deep orange and navy blue. The pebbled rubber felt just the right kind of rough under his fingertips. Harry couldn't stop himself from smiling like a madman. Then he noticed a little piece of paper taped to the box's side.

_To: Harry_

_From: Aunt Petunia_

Hedwig flew over to see what was going on. She landed on the bed and pecked at the box. When she looked up at Harry, he saw his own wide green eyes mirrored in her amber gaze.

"It's mine, Hedwig," he whispered. "It's for me."

Harry pulled the basketball out of the box and held it up before him. The weight of it was so satisfying. It filled the space before him, the space he didn't know was empty until his basketball articulated its shape. Harry hugged it to his chest, he spun it on his finger (or tried to), he rolled it back and forth across his bedroom floor. Hedwig watched him play with it, jealous and curious all at once. And when Harry finally sat down to finish his letter to Ron, he held the ball on his lap as he wrote.


	10. life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last part of the story, but there will be a bonus chapter including illustrations and a playlist featuring every song quoted, alluded to or mentioned in The Seam Between. Music is an incredibly important part of this story and listening to the playlist will give you a better sense of the sonic landscape around Harry in the summer of '95. And '90s music is also pretty awesome.
> 
> If you enjoyed this story—or even if you hated it—leave a comment and recommend it to your friends. I really enjoyed going on this journey with all of you, and your comments are incredibly valuable to me.

**_you'll never fail like common people_ **

**_you'll never watch your life slide out of view_ **

**"Common People," Pulp**

_19/07/95_

_Hey Hermione,_

_Thanks for the tapes you sent. I can't play them because I don't have a Walkman, but I'm sure they're good. Yes, I got the letter from Ron too. I'm alright. Things are the same here as usual. I got a new basketball from my aunt last week, so that was cool. Haven't heard any news but I've been checking every day. I know the letters are getting there late, it's because Hedwig's in a pissy mood and doesn't always want to fly. The heat's getting to her. Yes, I've been clipping her nails. Yes, I'm doing my homework. No, I haven't done anything stupid (yet). I kind of wish you'd stop warning me. Anyways. See you soon._

_Harry_

* * *

Like buttons and coins and long-lost ticket stubs, bits of that summer would resurface from time to time, always in unexpected places. It re-emerged on a brilliant July evening in Wembley Stadium, where 63,000 Muggles gathered for a charity concert. The air was sweet and complex, scented with cigarette smoke and cotton candy. He was almost twenty-seven years old, deputy chief Auror in charge of event security. A Protean-charmed ticket stub in his back pocket would alert him to any emergencies. 

Backstage with his team, Harry toyed with the little fabric loops that fixed his wand to the interior of his sleeve. Two young men stepped onstage and took the microphone to introduce the program. Like Harry, they were famous for something they'd never chosen. And like Harry, they'd lost their mother. Wizarding reporters had been eager to point out the similarities when they asked Harry for comments; they even printed side-by-side photos of Harry's mother and their mother, comparing the women on the basis of looks, romantic history, and the tragedy of their untimely deaths.

The young men delivered a speech onstage, with perfunctory remarks about charity and legacies. Then they returned backstage, to be swarmed by assistants and security guards. Harry remained in the shadows; ever-present and unnoticed, as per his professional dictates. An woman in a pantsuit handed a water bottle to the younger of the two brothers, and said "I hope you're well, Harry."

Harry—our Harry—looked up, frozen. In that moment, Mrs. Figg was alive again, and the glass of lemonade was in her hand. He was fourteen, cut-up, shaggy, overgrown, confused, at odds with everything. "Buddy Holly" played on repeat in the silent stereo of his mind. Cats, everywhere.

"Wonderful, thanks, and how are you?" said the young man, flashing a charismatic smile that sold a million magazine covers. A blonde pop singer greeted the audience. Cheers grew into a distant roar, just like they had at the opening of the Third Task. Dazed, Harry pulled out his ticket stub, checking for news, grounding himself. He discretely tapped his wand to the serial code, changing each digit to letters that spelled out "ANYUPDATES."

_ALLOKNOTROUBLE_ appeared. Harry sighed with relief, and the perky pop song rose up in his mind like a velvet curtain.

_I'm just beginning_

_The pen's in my hand_

_Ending unplanned_

A few summers later, Harry was slicing open a fat watermelon with a butcher knife, trying to ward away his children's demanding fingers, when he overshot and slashed into his palm by accident. It was bloody, but not serious. The children screamed and burst into tears, convinced their father was about to die. He ought to have comforted them, but he was lost for a moment; the straight line, the sharp knife, the setting sun turning a Victorian mansion from white to pink, and Peter Pettigrew's hideous smirk. But then Lily's dramatic wailing brought him back.

"It's only a cut, love," he said. "I know it looks bad, but it's not bad—come, let's get a tissue. James, put that down at once!'

And then there was the Granger family reunion in Australia, which Harry attended because apparently, he was a Granger too. The adults were drinking hard lemonade and hard cider and hard anything else, while the teens clustered on the beach, trying to be subtle about their underage magic. Between the waving grasses were dark spots: hidden scorpions, lying in wait.

"Careful where you step barefoot, Ron," said Hermione.

"Yeah, I know."

"I know you know, but you forget."

"You think I'd forget the _day_ after a rattlesnake almost murdered me?" 

They bickered amiably, on and on, until Harry leaned back in his lawn chair and closed his eyes. The breeze carried the smell of hot earth, dried-out grass and yellowing trees. Old, familiar longings rose in his belly. Drought smell from a fever dream, long nights and endless days, Lucozade, stacks of newspaper blocking the air conditioning vent. Scrubbing owl urine out of the cage's tray in the upstairs bathroom. Harry breathed in and out. He felt cold, wet fingers on his shoulder. Blinking against the sun, he looked up at Ginny. 

"The water's nice," she said. Her braid was dripping. "Will you come in with me?

He hesitated, in between worlds. Private Drive was shimmering in his mind's eye. But Ginny was smiling. And in the interim years, he'd learned how to be Harry: you jump in, never hesitate, don't look back in anger, and run, run, run like hell.

So he said: "I'll race you."

He would become Harry again. He would become himself.

* * *

A long, lazy week passed after Harry received his basketball. He scrubbed the bathroom sink, swept the kitchen, Hoovered the carpets and prepared salads, but otherwise, there wasn't much to do at home. Harry spent most of his free time making circuits between the TV, radio, newspaper and Hedwig. Sinn Féin attacked a Catholic school in Belfast, reports emerged of Bosniaks massacred by Bosnian Serb troops, and Bill Gates became the world's richest man. No news of Voldemort; nothing about Cedric Diggory either, though Harry had stopped looking. He was starting to hope that maybe Cedric had never existed, and therefore, had not died. Maybe last year had been a bad dream.

Relations with Hedwig were deteriorating. Harry berated her for not bringing him news; then she would get angry with him and bite him, drawing blood. He would curse her, she would squawk at him, and then they'd both sulk for several hours before starting the cycle again. At night, he let her out of the cage so she could hunt, and he was up at the crack of dawn, hoping for letters: there were some, but none of any importance. 

The cigarette burn healed, without a scar. Despite the non-severity of his injury, Harry still thought it was bloody demented of Piers to even try that. Piers, in Harry's opinion, ought to get on his knees and thank his deity of choice that Harry could not use his wand on summer holidays. One day, Dudley invited Piers over to listen to hip hop while they hotboxed his room. Harry slammed the front door and stalked the streets for hours, basketball in hand. It was high noon and the sun was brutal, but he didn't care. He had no intention of confronting Piers again until he had full magical rights. 

With his pocket full of money from Mrs. Figg, he decided to buy the ice lolly she'd suggested. Sweat was staining the armpits of his t-shirt by the time he reached the edge of the corner shop. The proprietor, a woman with Coke-bottle glasses and frothy white hair, glared at Harry as he wandered the air-conditioned aisles, killing time. Teenagers of Little Whinging were known for three things: smoking, making noise, and shoplifting.

"No loitering," said the proprietor. "This is a store, not a back alley. And don't you even think about bouncing that ball."

"I'm buying something," grumbled Harry. The poster behind the cash register read _We're Happy When You're Happy_. It was not strictly untrue, given that neither Harry nor the proprietor felt very happy.

"Well, get on with it, then." 

He approached the freezer and pulled open its glass door. Change of plans: no ice lolly. He had more than enough to buy a drumstick with crushed peanuts embedded in its chocolate shell. When Harry placed a bill on the proprietor's counter, he made sure to give her a look that said, _Screw you_. The basketball was on the floor, clenched between his feet.

The proprietor held the bill up to the light, analyzing it.

"Right, then." She pressed a few buttons on the cash register and the drawer popped open. "Here's your change."

Harry pocketed the coins smugly. His drumstick was unwrapped before he even stepped out the door. With a basketball under his left arm and a fresh chocolate drumstick in his right hand, he felt more than ready to take on the half-empty suburban streets of Little Whinging. Grey and navy cars drove by, all middle class and respectable makes and models. He passed a young mother carrying a redheaded girl that reminded him of Ginny until he realized that she was having a tantrum and demanding to be put down. Her angry screams reminded Harry of the mermaid song from his golden egg.

Though several children were playing on the climbing frame, the basketball court was empty. Harry sat down to finish his ice cream on a wooden bench facing the court. The sun warmed his skin, blazing from a sky cloudless and empty as a cradle. He couldn't remember a British summer with weather like this. 

Finally, Harry crunched on the very last bite of the cone. He licked a chocolate drip from his lower lip. The basketball net was calling out to him. He scrunched up the drumstick wrapping paper and tossed it into a rubbish bin, letting the basketball roll out onto the centre of the court. Firm rubber and warm asphalt. He dribbled and shot for the very centre of the backboard; the ball missed by more than a foot, and fell into a grassy area behind the court. Harry dashed over to recover the ball. Careful not to touch a discarded latex sheath lying in the grass next to it (he swore upon discovery) Harry picked up his ball and returned to the court. Over and over, he dribbled, aimed, shot and missed. Sometimes, the ball bounced heavily off the backboard and hit the ground, rolling back in Harry's direction. Usually, he missed by a wider margin and had to run after his ball. The children in the playground were laughing at him.

_If you saw me fly_ , he thought, _you'd be sorry. It's just different on the ground_. On the ground, you had to play by Muggle rules; you had to dribble like you'd never seen a brick wall dissolving into thin air. You had to shoot as though you'd never been locked in a duel with an ageless man, surrounded by a cage of golden light. You had— 

"Cheep cheep." Harry saw something appear in his peripheral vision; before he could process it, sharp talons scraped his shoulder, tearing his T-shirt. But Pigwidgeon had missed his mark, and could not land on Harry as Hedwig did; he overshot and crashed to the asphalt, bouncing several times like a fluffy tennis ball, before coming to a stop.

"Um...are you alright?" Harry rushed forward. He picked up Pig, checking his eyes for signs of a concussion, but Pig cheeped on happily. The owl thrust out one talon; an envelope was tied to his ankle with string.

"Thanks, mate." Harry hesitated, not used to receiving mail during broad daylight, and certainly not out in public. He glanced behind him, towards the children on the climbing frame, but they didn't seem to notice the fact that a tiny owl had just delivered mail to a scruffy teenage boy on the basketball court. _Muggles don't notice much, do they?_ Their joyful laughter and screams were unchanged. Harry placed Pig on his shoulder, careful not to let go until Pig had a decent grip.

The handwriting on the envelope was neat and unfamiliar—not Hermione's measured printing, Ron's chicken scratch or Sirius's dramatic cursive. He tore open the envelope, eager; inside it was a sheet of lined paper, and a newspaper clipping. Harry read the note first. 

_Dear Harry,_

_I hope this letter sees you in good health, physically and mentally. It was difficult for Molly and I to let you stay the summer with your aunt and uncle, but I'm sure you understand we had no choice. We will see you soon, I promise. I've been told that you were asking about Cedric Diggory's burial arrangements, and whether you would be asked to attend the funeral. I haven't heard from the Diggorys, but I saw this notice in the_ Magical Standard, _which is like a more regional version of the_ Prophet _. It's only printed once a week. I hope it answers any remaining questions you have. My understanding is that the Diggorys held a private funeral, and meant no disrespect by not inviting you. I think they (rightly) suspected that your presence might mean media attention they aren't in any position to handle._

_Molly and I send our best wishes (as do our children.)_

_Arthur Weasley_

If Harry's hands trembled as he unfolded the clipping, no one but Pig was there to witness it. He felt the owl's warm breath in his ear. And though Harry would never admit it, he was glad to split his grief down the middle so that tiny Pigwidgeon might carry half its weight.

_July 16, 1995_

_CEDRIC WALTER DIGGORY (1977-1995) died immediately after co-winning the TriWizard Tournament at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where he excelled academically and in sport. Cedric was a prefect and Quidditch captain for Hufflepuff House, but he will be remembered forevermore as a kind, generous, and loyal son and friend. Cedric had a passion for fair play and sportsmanship. As a small child, Cedric could be found giving away his Quidditch figures to children on the playground who didn't have any. Cedric never started a fight, but he was known for settling them with his wise words and patience. His dignity and compassion for others shone through every aspect of his short life. From his childhood Gobstones Club to the TriWizard Tournament, Cedric held himself to the highest standard possible. His death leaves his family and friends bereft of our guiding light. We had so hoped to see Cedric rise to a position of leadership, wherein he could spread his gentle courage and generosity to the wider world. Without him, we are lost._

_Cedric's funeral will be held privately. Donations may be made to Hogwarts School's charitable foundation. In lieu of graveside visitation, we ask that you wake before dawn and watch the sun rise, knowing that it's only a fraction as bright as Cedric might have shone, had he been given the chance._

It was high noon, but Harry looked up. He squinted, blinded by an unbearable, dazzling radiance. Then he replaced the note and envelope in his pocket and found his basketball. He and Cedric had been Seekers. Their hands were made to grab hold and never let go. But this is not always possible. So, Harry positioned himself squarely before the hoop. He bent his knees and jumped. The ball drew a perfect arc from his outstretched arms, a rainbow of motion. It was within kissing distance of the hoop— 

Harry closed his eyes. He would remember that shot, by choice, as nothing but net.


	11. coda

Thank you for reading _The Seam Between._ I strongly suggest enjoying this playlist on headphones while you skulk around your suburban neighbourhood, feeling generally powerless and pissed off at the world.  


**_tracklist_ **


End file.
